and kill people in the process, this was the dumbest thing I had ever done.
Well, there was the time I talked Leonard into going to Groveton during a flood to deal with the Ku Klux Klan. And there was the time we tried to get a stolen treasure out of the Sabine River bottoms. My idea again.
Come to think of it, my life had sort of been a series of dumb ideas. Some of them mine, a few Leonard’s. Hell, I had even voted Republican once in a Texas governor’s election.
We put our suitcases on the bed and took out our clothes and hung them in the closet, which was a gap in the wall with a metal bar for a clothes rack.
We put our suitcases in there too. It was a tight fit. We put our shaving kits in the bathroom. I took time to brush my teeth and put the book I was reading, along with my reading glasses, on the nightstand, which was bolted to the wall.
We sat on our beds across from one another. I looked over the itinerary they had given us as we entered the ship.
“Well, here we are,” Leonard said.
“Yep,” I said.
“We haven’t left dock yet, have we?”
“Nope.”
“Are you bored as I am?”
“Reckon so.”
“They have movies on this ship?”
“I read how they did when I got the original stuff from the cruise line, but this itinerary they gave us, I was just glancing through it. Looks like we don’t have movies. Wait a minute. Here’s a few, but you watch them on the TV.”
“TV?”
“I don’t believe I stuttered.”
“I heard they had theaters, regular movies, you know.”
“John tell you that?”
“He did.”
“Did he say they had them on this ship?”
“He don’t know from this ship.”
“There you are. We got the tub of cruise lines. Our luck is still in, Leonard. Only it’s bad luck.”
“Oh well. What are the movies?”
“ The Postman.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“ Harley Davidson amp; The Marlboro Man.”
“I seen all this shit and didn’t like it on the big screen. I could get my money back on that Postman, I would. Least the other one had some good fistfights. Or was it gunfights? It kind of runs together. But that Postman, I thought maybe I was in some kind of purgatory with popcorn. Someone had locked the door there would have been suicides. What else is there?”
I read off the two remaining movies.
Leonard said, “That last one sounds promising.”
“It says it has subtitles.”
“God. Next to sitting next to someone wants to talk about crystals and astrological signs and the nature of their diseases, I like subtitles better. But just.”
“French subtitles.”
“Guess that beats subtitles in Ebonics.”
“Hey, we didn’t go on a cruise to watch television or movies, did we?”
“I did.”
“That’s not the proper spirit.”
“What kind of spirit is proper? I thought I’d just hang out, read, and watch movies.”
“You can. On TV.”
“Yeah, maybe one movie out of four.”
“You git what you git.”
“I wanted a big screen, Hap.”
“People in hell want ice water.”
“How long before dinner?”
I glanced at the clock on the nightstand, then the itinerary. “Two hours. You hungry?”
“No. Not really. Anything else going on?”
“Shuffleboard will start shaking in about half an hour.”
“Want to go up on deck?”
“Sure, maybe we can swim back to land before we actually disembark.”
“There’s a thought.”
We locked our cabin, went up a flight of stairs, then another, and finally onto the deck. It was a pretty afternoon out, starting to gray some, but there was still plenty of light. Our ship had started to sail.
We leaned against the railing and watched the New Orleans dock retreat.
“Didn’t a ship run right into this dock once?” Leonard said.
“Yep,” I said. “Couldn’t stop.”
“In a hurry to get back to land, I figure.”
“Think it’s too late to swim for shore?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
We stood on the deck until the dock and New Orleans were out of sight and the brown water turned blue. Then there was no more dock or New Orleans visible, just the water and our ship pushing into the Gulf and the night coming down soft and the Gulf air sweet with the occasional bite of dead fish, and there was the Gulf itself, washing hard against the ship, washing us steadily with the assistance of a great engine, on out to the deeps.
8
We stood out there by the rail and talked and watched the night fall on the blue water, first making it purple, then black. The wash of it against the side of the ship was hypnotic, and once we got past our initial sensation of feeling like mice trapped in a tin can, we began to relax.
We finally went back to our room to wash up and brush our teeth and shave. It was just something to do. We were finishing up this when there was a singsong whistle on our cabin’s intercom. It was followed by a voice telling us all to meet on the deck to find out which was our lifeboat and to learn what to do in case the ship sank, other than drown.
We went out on the deck for our words of wisdom. Essentially, the wisdom was, the big boat started sinking, in an orderly fashion, you got in a smaller boat that was supposed to be lowered over the side of the larger sinking boat. That was about it.
A little later, back in our room, the whistle sounded again, this time with an invitation to all passengers to have dinner, and it ended with the words: “Bon appetit.”
We wandered outside and saw the cattle call moving in the direction of the dining room. According to our information, there were two dining rooms. One that served more formally, and presumably better food, and another that was a kind of buffet.
The menu that came with our cabin information said the meal in the main dining room was lobster this night, and we both wanted that.
When we got to the dining room, a fellow in a white coat, white pants, white shirt, and a black bow tie was kind enough to tell us we couldn’t come in without coats.
“Why not?” Leonard said.
The door usher, or whatever his title was, was a tall man with dark skin and dark hair with a bald spot at the
