On the Chesapeake, July 2024, a boat owner sleeps at the helm. (Photo by John Griswold)
An exchange at the start of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song portrays the comedy of surprise at learning something that changes the landscape we thought we knew. Brenda Nicols and her husband Johnny are driving to pick up her cousin Gary Gilmore, who has just been released from prison for armed robbery and later, famously, will be executed for murder.
“Brenda hadn’t been married to Johnny for eleven years without coming to know her husband was the type for peace at any price,” Mailer writes. “No waves in this life if he could help it. Brenda wouldn’t say she looked for trouble, but a few waves kept life interesting.”
Brenda also feels her sexual power and “hadn’t gone into marriage four times without knowing she was pretty attractive on the hoof….” She quietly fixates on Gilmore’s body in her imagination, squaring him up as she would a sexual partner. In her rising excitement on the late-night drive, it finally slips out.
“Oh my God,” said Brenda, “I wonder how tall he is.”
“What?” said Johnny.
That “What?,” with its inverted speech tag, stands for all those moments a new detail kills off a story we thought we knew.
This happened several times on my trip up the eastern seaboard aboard Castaway, the 55-foot Neptunus my friend Chris bought in Fort Pierce, Florida. That is how I knew the trip was working.
For instance, Chris told many stories about the boat’s previous owner, Fred. Fred had run the boat almost entirely in freshwater, for the small amount he used it at all, and was maybe afraid of the sea. Fred and his broker lied to Chris’ face during the sale, as if he did not know, being a businessman himself. Fred could not pilot his own boat during the inspection. Fred had never done vital maintenance; the generator alone was a rusted hulk with rotting hoses. Fred was an aging guy who owned a chain of carpet stores, or some such, and was dowdy. A real Rotarian.
Fred offered many such occasions for stories on our long sea trial, because things were constantly being discovered to be faulty due to his negligence. (This was also the reason the boat could be purchased for only $240,000.)
Fred did seem to feel guilty, for what it was worth, or maybe he was worried about liability. He called every day from Georgia, even when we were miles at sea, until it began to feel as if he was checking to make sure we had not died.
When it became clear we were going to make it to the top of the Chesapeake Bay, where Castaway would winter, his manner changed. He demanded Chris mail him back an expensive and very heavy shore-power cable, even though the boatyard where we started had given the cable to Chris. Fred still had the title to the yacht’s motor dinghy, so he had something to hold ransom.
Anyway, it was around then, with Castaway tied up safely in a marina and the usual tasks done for the day, that Chris turned to me where I sat in a folding chair on the fantail and told me Fred had shot somebody once—“blew him away.”
“What?” said I.
I looked up, hyper-focused, the way you do when the world re-crystallizes from one bit of new data.
Chris told me that several years ago Fred had seen a carjacking in progress. He tried to intervene and got cut on the arm by the knife-wielding perp. Fred retreated to his own car, but the attacker followed. Fred took his pistol out of the car and shot him dead, point-blank.
Chris had learned about it when Fred complained about his arm not healing well. Chris asked what had happened, and Fred calmly told him about killing the man and his own long recovery from the knife wound. Chris was startled too at the time and suddenly saw Fred as someone very different, maybe not a guy he should be in conflict with in the purchase of the boat.
“Why wasn’t that the first thing you told me about Fred?” I said. I almost felt angry.
“I was giving you pertinent details as you needed to know them,” Chris said.
I say I like to travel because it is another opportunity to see. Sometimes the universe says, See this, then, dear boy.
