Port Starbird (Storm Ketchum Adventures) (2 page)

"He sent me another
'final offer' in the mail," Ketch elaborated, neglecting to specify just how final it really was. "It said I should respond immediately."

"Hey, let's use
some a the bigger rigs today, I'm feelin' lucky," the Captain directed. "Another offer, you say? When was that?"

"
A couple of weeks ago, right after you left for your vacation."

"Well, what'd you tell 'em?"

Ketch shrugged and kept working. The Captain turned toward him and grabbed a rag to wipe his hands. "Maybe y'all ought to take it this time. It's gonna happen, you know, no matter what them tree-huggers do, now he's done with his legal troubles. Y'all don't wanna end up livin' smack in the middle a his mess, right?"

"Oh, I know it's going to happen."
Ketch shook his head. "But what he's offering is still less than what I could get for it on my own. Or could have, before all this damned foolishness. Also it's just what they decided is fair market value for the house, no moving expenses or anything." He snorted disgustedly. "Besides, I'm settled there now, and it's my home. I don't want to move, and I shouldn't have to just so some damn rich cracker can line his pockets some more and play king of the damn hill."

"Well, at least he ain't a damn yankee. Oh, sorry, forgot you was a yankee," the Captain jibed.

"Forgot you was a cracker," Ketch replied despite his agitation, completing his part of their standing joke.

"Anyhow, I hear most everybody's agreed to sell
. I heard that fella with the horses finally give up."

"I don't care, and I don't care how much money he offers." Ketch scowled. "It just isn't right. And you should
see the way that cocky bastard talks down to people."

"You talked with him direct?"

"No, but I have letters."

"Well, that might just be legalese, you know. God knows that's enough to piss off most folks, tryin' to read that crap."

"No, it isn't that, he dictated them. And anyway, what about the environment, and what about ruining what's left of this town? And what about probably getting away with murder, for Pete's sake, what about
that
? I know they haven't been able to prove it so far, but he may well have killed off not one, but two wives for their money. How can people just let that slide and go along with someone like that, like nothing happened? I don't understand..."

"I know, I know," the Captain interrupted. "
But hey, come on now, don't go gettin' all worked up so early in the mornin', that ain't no good for us old folks." He stowed the rag and started climbing up to the flying bridge. "We can jaw some more later. Let's get goin', we got to be down to Oden's by eight."

Ketch took a deep breath.
"Aye-aye, Captain," he exhaled. He didn't feel quite ready to spill the rest of his story just now anyway. There would come a time soon enough. Never mind the tree huggers... It might not pan out in the long run - in fact, would most probably not - but he had a plan that would hopefully enable him to at least make a truly unique statement on his way out, the essence of said plan being to basically make enough of a highly visible nuisance of himself to cause certain people in high places some public embarrassment and get folks talking.

He wished he could do more - like somehow prove that Ingram was guilty of murder
; now
that
would surely stop him in his tracks, certainly more effectively than anything the environmentalists had done or could do - but he was no detective and thus by extension no Sherlock Holmes as well, which was what might be needed here in that regard since everyone else had failed to convict the man. But that was just a pipedream, and he had some work to do now.

Wh
ile the Captain started the engines, Ketch released the mooring lines. He took in the breast line to starboard and the forward and aft spring lines from the bollards to port, and then the stern line. At the Captain's signal he pulled in the bow line, and once they were clear of the boatyard he took in the fenders. While the Captain carefully guided the boat out into the sound, Ketch removed the lines from their cleats and coiled them and stowed them where they wouldn't get underfoot later. Then he set out the dog's blanket and water dish in the cabin.

He ordinarily did m
uch of the piloting on their fishing charters, but for now he opted to settle in the cabin with the dog instead of joining the Captain on the flying bridge. It was hard to talk over the engines and the wind anyway. He gave the dog a hug to reassure the animal, who had started panting when he'd raised his voice earlier.

As they steamed south toward the
village of Hatteras, Ketch thought about how Avon had changed since he'd first started vacationing here years ago, and throughout its existence. Though Hatteras Island was about fifty miles long, most of it was just a wisp of beach and marsh in width. It was wider at Cape Hatteras and some of the settlements, and maybe a mile wide at best through most of Avon; so Avon was basically a road town, really, most of its business district straddling the one and only two-lane highway that ran the length of the island. And though its beaches were clean and undeveloped, and there was no unsightly industry of any consequence, he had to admit it was largely ruined already, at least to his way of thinking.

Waste disposal, water pollution, and loss of natural habitat were always problematic on an island
nowadays, especially if it was a tourist destination; and architecturally, there was precious little of historic value left in the town. No one had had the foresight or the wherewithal to preserve for the public the old lifesaving stations that had once existed along the Atlantic coast of Hatteras Island, except for the Chicamacomico station and museum thirty miles up the road; the Big Kinnakeet station on the south end of Avon, damaged by a hurricane in the Forties, had been demolished, and the remnants of the Little Kinnakeet station buildings on the north end were still in a state of restoration limbo and not open to the public.

A
nd he'd lost count of the ostentatious new beach houses and soundside developments that had sprung up here in the last twenty years or so, often at the expense of older dwellings and other legacy structures. They, along with a plethora of associated realty offices that reminded him of remoras on a whale shark, were now nearly as ubiquitous as the cordgrass in the salt marshes and the sea oats on the dunes. And of course it was vastly different than it had been in earlier times, when this part of the island had been wider before the erosion that resulted from the decimation of the expansive stands of live oak and cedar harvested for boat building and other commerce, and from the now-nonexistent cattle devouring just about everything else they could get at back then.

But
to the town's credit, there was less of the blatant commercialism and cultural homogenization here that he knew had infected other popular coastal areas like a plague. Yes, there were some small, touristy strip malls here and there along Route 12, and scads of vacation rentals - but there were no fancy resorts or even hotels, just the retro but trim Avon Motel; no chain restaurants nor fast-food abominations unless one counted the Subway and the Dairy Queen, neither of which bothered Ketch much since he happened to be fond of subs and ice cream; and no department stores, golf courses, apartment complexes, cheap boarding houses, or boardwalks stocked with carnival rides and arcades and other tacky amusements - yet. One would have to go off-island an hour's drive or so north past Oregon Inlet to the Nags Head / Kill Devil Hills / Kitty Hawk sprawl to start enjoying some of those fruits of so-called progress, or several hours farther south. Well, except for the mini-golf down in Frisco, and the go-karts and water slide and such up around Rodanthe, now that he thought about it - but there was nothing like that here in Avon so far.

Though
radically changed in many ways, the town still retained some tenuous bits of character and individuality, some sense of history, and some meager traces of its original old-time flavor - but for how much longer? Who needed a state-of-the-art marina with upscale condos and a luxury hotel, for crying out loud, in Avon? And then what else would start sprouting up after that - Outbacks, Targets, amusement parks? And why would any of the bigger boats want to be based here in the first place? If there wasn't room enough in Hatteras, expanding between there and Frisco would make more sense.  But Avon was Ingram's turf, and he guessed that might be reason enough.

Fishing and other water sports were indeed the main attractions on this stretch of the Banks, but due to its mid-island location sport fishing in Avon mostly meant surf fishing, either directly from the beach or from the
venerable Avon Pier. You couldn't berth nor launch yachts and head boats in the breakers on the ocean side of the island, so from Avon their closest access to the Atlantic and its Gulf Stream would be via Hatteras Inlet to the south, where the
Minnow
was headed right now; and many of those bigger boats might also be unable to navigate the shallow sound between here and there. Were there definite plans in place to do more dredging in the sound between Avon and Hatteras? Ketch didn't know, but there would have to be; again, more bad news for the sound's ecosystems.

There was also Oregon Inlet
on the north end of the island, but that was twice as far, and for Oregon Inlet it would make more sense to build around Rodanthe - though it wouldn't make much sense there either, since the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center, a full-service marina just across the bridge, was both close to the more populous and developed Nags Head area, and not appreciably closer to Rodanthe than Hatteras was to Avon.

Ocracoke Island, farther south down the Banks across Hatteras Inlet, and its historic namesake fishing village seemed to have settled into a tolerable if uneasy truce between the old and the new, and the fact that Hatteras Island had the Cape Hatteras National Seashore along its
Atlantic coast and the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge at the north end of the island would thankfully limit some excesses; but probably not all. Ketch knew that the people who cared here had increasingly had to fight to preserve their free and open spaces, despite their supposedly protected status.

In spite of everything,
Ketch believed that at this late stage of his life he was finally where his soul or essence or whatever needed to be, and he'd thought he'd be able to pretty much settle in for the duration when he'd taken the leap and moved here almost three years ago - but now he felt like maybe the lingering ambience of this place, still able to charm despite its imperfections, had lulled him into a false sense of security. Maybe he should have paid more attention and gotten more involved in local affairs, even though such activities ordinarily bored him. But what could just one man have accomplished anyway, especially a less-than-wealthy one these days?

Regardless, that was over his shoulder now; and here he was, reduced to ineffectually complaining about some of the undesirable aspects of the tourism that like it or not was now undeniably the lifeblood of th
e town, while admittedly offering no viable alternatives. There were no longer any lifesaving stations here, the Hatterasman was long gone, and the modern residents no longer salvaged shipwrecks or hauled lumber or built boats or milled anything or sold yaupon tea for a living. Though it galled him to stand by and watch the future steamroll what little was left of the town's invaluable past, the fact was without tourism this town would quickly fade into oblivion and wither away; and yet, like many of the locals he knew, he'd bite the hand that fed them all if he could. Ketch guessed that attitude might make him, too, a local now despite his short full-time tenure here, a thought he found perversely satisfying.

But that changed nothing, including the fact that, through no fault of his own, this issue had now become
painfully personal to him. He didn't know exactly how it would all unfold; all he knew for sure was, things were going all to hell for him once again - pretty much the way they always had sooner or later, pretty much wherever the hell he'd been, pretty much all along the way.

~  ~  ~

And it was a hell of a fine morning for cruising, and cruising invariably put Ketch in a mystic frame of mind even after all these years, so his disposition had markedly improved by the time they reached Oden's Dock in Hatteras. You should only worry about things you can change, he told himself, and he couldn't change anything at this particular moment.

As they made their approach
, Ketch was pleased to see there was a dockside helper today. Sometimes there was none, which made his job harder. He hung the fenders on the stern and each side of the boat and went to the bow. When they'd backed in close enough, he tossed the bow line to the helper. As soon as the helper's end was secure, he snubbed his own end to a cleat, made sure it was set into the chock, and quickly moved to the stern via the starboard side deck to repeat the process, which they completed today without the boat bumping the dock or the neighboring charter. The dog remained in the cabin as he'd learned was expected of him. Ketch did one quick, loose spring line before sparing a wave for the helper.

"Thanks, Ronn
ie Wayne, I appreciate it."

"No problem
, Ketch, have a good trip!"

Ketch resumed tying up the boat, tightening the initial lines as he went. The Captain killed the engines and descended from the flying bridge.
"Classic mornin', absolutely classic!" he proclaimed, stretching his arms to the sky. Spying his party approaching along the dock from the ship's store and shifting into what passed for his formal mode, he said, "Mister Ketchum, if you'll make sure they load the ice and bait as usual, I'll tend to bidness." He gathered his materials, disembarked, and intercepted the party halfway down the dock.

"Ahoy there, Doc, and good mornin' to y'all!" he brayed. A gull standing atop a piling
slipped and nearly fell from its perch. "Cap'n Don and
My Minnow
at your service, folks!" He shook hands all around. "How's about we all set right down here'n get the paperwork out a the way before we board?" he said, motioning to a nearby picnic table.

Ketch helped the dog up to the dock and they made their way to the ship's store to arrange for the supplies. "
Good morning, Roger, " he said as they entered the store. "We're ready for our usual for an inshore halfer for six, if you don't mind."

"Sure thing, Ketch. Hey, Jack!"

The dog wagged contentedly. They were regulars here now and the dog knew it was permissible for him to enter the store; and he also knew they'd pick up something to snack on later, generally a sausage biscuit and a package of little doughnuts, both of which Ketch would share with him.

As they returned to the boat Ketch overheard the Captain say
ing, "I'm real sorry Doc, I most surely am, but I'm only allowed by law to carry six passengers besides my crew, which is me'n my mate. It's a matter a safety, see..." Uh-oh, a spot of trouble in Paradise; looked like they'd brought more people than they'd said they would. But that was the Captain's business and he was good at it, and he'd find a way to satisfy them. Meanwhile he himself had better see to the ice and bait. "But hey, I got an idea, tell you what we might could do...," was the last thing Ketch heard.

Everything was in place and everyone seemed happy by the time the party boarded. Ketch got the dog settled in the cabin after they'd both been introduced to the Captain's party.
Ketch chuckled inwardly; the Captain could certainly be charming when he wanted to be.

He
again cast off while the Captain guided them out, and then he assumed his customary post at the cabin controls. He might go up top later if things were quiet, but he'd stay down below for now. This was the easy part of his job as mate; the Captain would do most of what Ketch considered the dirty work from here on while Ketch did the driving, which suited Ketch as he'd rather read than watch people fish.

He'd brought along a book, but he always enjoyed
looking at the charts as well on these excursions. He was not formally trained in marine navigation, but he found the Captain's charts fascinating. At first glance an apparently unintelligible mass of shadings, numbers, graphic symbols, varying type styles, arcane abbreviations, solid and broken lines and geographic features, they were much more than road maps, and in their conciseness concealed a wealth of detail on such things as depth variations, shoreline features and surveys where available, and locations of lights, harbors, marinas, underwater obstacles, wrecks, navigational markers, dredged and undredged basins and channels, dredge dumping areas, and known artillery drops. Ketch thought of ordering a set of local charts just for his own personal perusal every time he saw them on the boat, but he'd somehow not gotten around to it yet.

"Mister Ketchum, let's head northwest, see if we can get us some flounder," the Captain called. "But watch the shoals!"

"Roger that," Ketch replied. Though the Captain had a good GPS, he intended to also reference the charts along the way. Technology has its advantages, but he thought it was a shame that the old methods had to drop by the wayside. Navigational techniques had of course been changing and advancing since the era of sail, but still...

Most recently, h
e'd just missed out on LORAN-C. Since World War II the LORAN network, a radio-based geo-location system, had been a reliable albeit complex way for sailors and pilots around the world to locate their position. But with the advent of GPS the decision had been made to shut down the broadcast towers, and the Coast Guard had taken the last U.S. tower off-line about three years ago. Ketch hoped the satellites didn't somehow become disabled someday, by terrorists or a war or even just the sun misbehaving - then everyone would be blind again, electronically speaking. He wondered how many people still knew how to navigate by the sun, moon, and stars.

His reveries were interrupted by the thumping of the dog's tail on the deck. The youngest member of the party had entered the cabin and was petting the dog and staring at Ketch. The Captain followed the boy in.

"Ahoy, Mister Ketchum, this young 'un here is called Henry," the Captain said, resting a hand on the boy's shoulder. The normally blustery skipper seemed atypically trepidatious, which Ketch found interesting. "See, we got us too many passengers today, legally speakin'," he continued, "so I'm thinkin' we might need to have two mates on this charter, if you catch my drift." Ketch did and nodded amiably, to the Captain's visible relief. "So, young Henry will be our second mate today," the Captain concluded. "Now Henry, Mister Ketchum here is our first mate, and I'm the captain - so he takes his orders from me, and you take your orders from him. You got that, son?"

"Yes sir,"
the boy replied deferentially, his head bowed. He looked up at Ketch. "Where'd you get that hat, sir?" he inquired.

Ketch gave the boy a friendly smile
. Though it had been a long time and he hadn't seen much of his son even then, he remembered when that boy had been this one's age. "Do you like it?" he asked, and the boy shyly nodded. "Well, Indiana Jones gave it to me. Do you know who he is?" The boy nodded again, wide-eyed. "It's made from recycled truck tarps from South America. He wore this hat one time when we explored some ruins down there. He got a new hat after that, the one he wears in the movies, so he gave me this one."

The Captain guffawed, startling the boy. "Don't fall for his malarkey, son! He got that hat at Nag's Head Hammocks up in Avon, I was there when he bought it!"

The boy looked back at Ketch in confusion. "He's right," Ketch said. "I told you a tall tale. You know what that is, right? Anyway, it's a good hat, isn't it? Okay, come over here." He motioned for the boy to join him at the controls. "Have you ever driven a boat?" The boy shook his head. "Well here, take the wheel for a little while. I need a break." The boy's eyes grew even wider. "Really, it's okay. Here you go, two hands, that's right. Now do you see this mark on the compass? You have to try to make the needle stay close to that mark. That's good, now turn left, just a little, and wait for the boat to catch up with you. She responds slowly, so you don't want to oversteer..."

The Captain quietly exited the cabin
, and the boy's face glowed as Ketch continued to coach him. When it appeared he'd more or less gotten the hang of it, Ketch left him at the wheel and went to fetch a bottle of water from the Captain's cooler. They were advancing slowly enough that it wouldn't much matter if they went a bit off-course, at least for a short time in this particular area. They had to be always mindful of the shoals in these waters. It would be embarrassing to run aground at any time, but especially so during a charter.

Ketch settled in the cabin behind the boy where he could see the compass and the GPS, drank his water, and shared his breakfast with the dog. Then he rejoined the boy at the wheel.

"Good job, Henry! Really, not bad for your first time," he said. "Okay now, keep one hand on the wheel and put your other one here, on the throttles. We're almost where we want to be, so we have to start slowing down now. Remember, a boat doesn't have brakes..."

When it was time to stop, Ketch relieved the boy at the controls. "You can go out and fish for a while now
, Henry, if you like," he said. "I'll call you back when I need you. Okay?" The boy left the cabin then, as did the dog who was curious as always about what these people might drag up from below the surface.

They'd idle and fish for a while here and see what developed. Ketch retrieved a battered paperback book from his backpack. He generally preferred his
electronic-book reader these days, but exposing it to salt and spray was probably not a wise thing to do. The dog wandered back in and Ketch gave him a bone to gnaw on, then climbed up to the flying bridge. It would be comfortable there under the awning with the brisk sea breeze that was blowing today, and he'd have the controls there in case he was needed.

Meanwhile he'd see if he could remember what was going to happen to Harry Morgan next in
To Have and Have Not
. He'd read this book before, but it had been a long time. He reminded himself to revisit
The Old Man and the Sea
soon; though he'd read that one several times through the years, it was by far his favorite. Re-reading it periodically was almost like a religious obligation for him, and he'd lately been feeling drawn to it again.

But for now, back to Harry. He knew the adventures of pirates and smugglers, even the more modern kind like Harry, struck most people as romantic
, but in reality it had always been a brutal and unforgiving way of life. But then again, nowadays there was the Wall Street crowd, for example, many of whom could be viewed as simply more sophisticated technology-based pirates, couldn't they? Their lives were usually longer and richer, but perhaps not any less difficult than the lives of the pirates of old, at least in terms of stress, especially for the ones who lived on the edge of the law or slightly beyond. And then there were people like Bob Ingram, the owner of HatterasMann Realty and the main depositor in Ketch's current bank of misery.

'HatterasMann' - a clever bit of
wordplay, he supposed, but he wasn't amused by it. The Hatterasman was the noblest figure in Hatteras Island lore. He was a rugged, proud, unpretentious and self-sufficient abstraction, making his living from fishing, whaling, boat building, wreck salvaging, farming whatever he could get to grow in this harsh environment, doing whatever it took to survive back in the wild old days.

The Hatterasman
was epitomized by the surfmen employed by the old U.S. Lifesaving Service and later the U.S. Coast Guard. At grave personal risk, these men attempted to rescue mariners from offshore shipwrecks, starting in the time before internal combustion engines and reliable charts. There'd been lighthouses along this coast since the late seventeen hundreds, but they weren't always adequate; and a combination of strong currents, frequent storms, and deadly shifting shoals had earned the coastal shipping lanes off Cape Hatteras the well-known epithet 'Graveyard of the Atlantic'.

Beginning in the mid-eighteen hundreds,
crews of these courageous men would launch sturdy wooden surfboats into the breakers and row out when a wreck was sighted, often at night and regardless of the season, and even during the fiercest of storms. Their regulations required them to go out, but didn't require them to return. Numerous members of several crews had over the years been awarded Gold and Silver Lifesaving Medals of Honor for their efforts, the highest honors that can be given for saving lives in peacetime. There'd been seven official lifesaving stations along the Atlantic coast of the island from 1874 well into the next century, two of them in the Kinnakeet area.

Whereas 'Mann' was simply the maiden name of Ingram's first wife, the founder of the realty he'd simply inherited from her.

"Good work, Mister Ketchum!" the Captain called after Ketch had been reading a while, oblivious to the activity below. "We got enough flounder and spots to fill a cooler! How's about takin' us through the inlet?"

"Will do," Ketch called back. He summoned the boy up to the flying bridge and they got the boat underway again. Ketch knew the buoys and markers,
such as they were in this changeable inlet, and when they reached the entrance of the inlet he pointed them out to the boy as he helped him navigate them through, giving a wide berth to other traffic and keeping a special eye out for the ferryboats that regularly traversed the roughly two-mile-wide inlet between Hatteras and Ocracoke Island to the southwest.