leaving the Rose in a place where the police were sure to look, that led me to the conclusion that Schilling. wasn't ready to hang up his jersey yet. And there had been a load of firearms in the barn; it was probably moved the night my strange friend and I paid a visit there. Where was that shipment now? Probably on its way overseas on some freighter or fishing vessel. If it was the last shipment perhaps Schilling would reappear and claim the Rose. No, maybe not. That depended on how well he'd covered his tracks.
Jim sat in the cabin instead of up on the flying bridge. It was too cold now for that. He eased the twin throttle knobs forward and the Whimsea lifted herself up out of the water a bit and began to plane. We clipped right along. I stood in the cockpit and watched the wake fan out behind us. The white and turquoise water mixed with the bluish exhaust smoke and rolled away behind us. The engines rumbled and spat and gurgled under my feet.
'Whatcha thinkin?'
I went forward and joined him at the helm. I squinted at a long brownish-red freighter in the distance.
'I'm thinking that James Schilling and I are going to meet face-to-face before very long,' I answered. 'We've scraped sides twice. I think the next meeting will be definitive.'
'Just so I'm not involved in it. If you seek him out, you do so alone.'
'Don't. worry. The police and the Coast Guard know where we'll be going; I saw to that. All I want to do right now is slide around the southern end of the Bay and keep my eyes open.'
We poured coffee and sat and chatted as he kept the boat headed straight on. We had the VHF on and tuned to channel 16, the distress frequency. Nothing interesting was happening. I switched a couple of times to the commercial bands used by cargo boats and fishermen, and got nothing but the usual technical lingo about course changes, gross weights, ETAs, cruise plans, and the like.
We kept the VHF on for a while. Behind the voices and the static was a constant drone that resembled an aircraft engine, or the rocket ships in the old Flash Gordon movies: 'mmmmmmrrrrm·rmmm-vessel taking water- rrrmmmmmmm-snap! Yeah we have her sighted 'bout sixty meters off Spectacle Island snap!- mmmmmmmmmmmrrrr…'
And so on, and on. It got a bit monotonous. We switched to the more lively CB scanner. 'fffftttt!… eeeoow!.. fffft!… my port engine's down, come back…' 'Jimmy' Hey Jimmy?' 'fffft! Yeah. .. said my mother-lovin' port diesel's down. No go-over.' 'You check out that fuel pump? Come back-' 'Don't think that's it-fffft!-Maybe it's the effin' injectors or else I gotta clogged-fffft.'' 'You gonna stay out, Jimmy?' 'Look I'll limp home on the starboard engine. You comin' out or what, come back?' 'Soon's I get some bread to top her up. I'm hockin' my old lady's socks right now to get fuel… where are you, come back?' 'I got-sszzzznapp! mmmmmmrmnmm… you there? OK, heading due north with Little Gurney Light off my port quarter 'bout three miles-you know where those deep troughs start? Over-' 'Yeah, gottcha, good buddy. But look, you get an RDF fix or loran fix and let me know exactly. You shouldn't be effin' around out there with one side down-' 'Yeah. I got-ffft.-so when I call you back you'll have it. I'm gone.'
Back to the VHF: '-Coast Guard Station in Boston with the latest weather-at two o'clock the temperature is fifty-six degrees and steady, winds south southwest four to six knots, gusting to nine… barometric pressure twenty-nine point seven and falling…seas two to five feet… visibility eight miles and closing. Light fog and drizzle-'
The number of vessels increased dramatically as we passed Boston about eight miles offshore. Especially predominant were larger vessels: freighters and tankers, large trawlers, and a few big yachts. We all intermingled and crossed paths at big distances and continued on our separate ways with remarkable ease. I glassed all the boats continually, especially the medium-length trawlers and smaller powerboats. If I were running guns and had abandoned my boat, I'd want a fast powerboat, like a sport-fisherman. But peering through binoculars at the boats that dotted the sea was a bit futile.
Shortly after three-thirty we were entering the breakwater at Plymouth. We slid around in the big harbor for an hour while I glassed everything in sight from Whimsea's cabin, looking for anything interesting or unusual. We went over to the smaller harbor of Duxbury with the same negative results. Then we cruised around the north side of the big bay across from North Plymouth. I showed Jim the Cowyard, Gray's Beach, and where I'd seen the Rose. We went in real close to the big cordage pier where the draggers were tied up. The boats floated on the still brown water. A man on the wharf came out of a warehouse underneath a big corrugated steel door. He was wheeling a dolly with steel wheels on it. The cart was piled high with cartons and the steel wheels made a racket on the concrete. That was all that was happening.
'Big deal,' said Jim.
'Yeah I know.'
Then we heard the faint clacking of a solenoid and another big steel door began rolling upward in the brick building. A lift truck whispered out, holding crates aloft on its pincers. A man in a yellow helmet was driving it. The crates said Ocean Spray on the sides.
'This is so exciting I can't stand it.'
'Let's swing by close, then go into town and get some bait.'
We crawled right up to the big pier and watched the few figures moving back and forth along it, We were close enough for me to glimpse a grisly relic strung up alongside the Cyclone fence that marked the terminus of the big dock. I hadn't noticed it on my previous visit; It was a codfish head, cut off right behind the gills, suspended on the fence with a stevedore's hook. It was as big as a bushel basket. Flies swarmed over it.
'Will you look at that. Must've been a five-footer,' said Jim. 'Why do you suppose they've done that with it?'
He shrugged and spun the wheel lazily in his big hands. He eased the sticks forward and the engine whined.
'Dunno. Trophy maybe. Or else it's a warning to stay out of the yards when the gate's shut.'
It was a grim reminder, and I thought of Angel's face staring at me from the oven rack. We picked up speed and soon landed at the main marina, where I bought Jim an early supper (apparently the entire trip, not just the fuel, was to be courtesy of Yours Truly) and we fueled the Whimsea's tanks and bought an ample supply of quahogs. These would be affixed to heavy hooks and dragged slowly (or simply rested) on the mollusk beds around the James Longstreet, a tempting treat for tautogs and other fish. While we waited for dusk prepared the bait, shucking it from the shells and cutting it into convenient-sized nuggets. We sucked down some of the St. Pauli Girl beer we'd brought along and listened to the radio. I was hunkered down in the cockpit out of the breeze so I removed my shirt, soaking up the last precious bit of sun,-even though it was thoroughly filtered by clouds. Jim pored over the charts of Cape Cod Bay.
Dusk came, and we left Plymouth Harbor.
We rolled out past the big break water again. A line of herring gulls stood on it, beaks to the breeze, most with one foot tucked up in their tummy feathers. They said skirl, skirl, skirl…
When we got to the James Longstreet the sun had been down forty minutes. It was growing dark fast. The old wreck looked more ominous than I'd ever seen it. Its bridge looked like a giant hunk of brown Swiss cheese. The hull was partially collapsed in the middle, where a lot of the steel reinforcing rods were visible, entwined in the concrete hull. The fly-boys from Otis were pretty good shots, I guessed. They'd nailed the old Liberty Ship right in the belly. In fact the midsection of the old hull was so full of holes and cave-ins that occasionally you could see clear through it to the dark bluish purple of the water on the other side. We crept in close; I DeGroot had his eyes glued to the fathometer fastened above the helm. It was a black box with a dial in the center, marked in feet and meters. A blip showed on the dial at zero feet, which was where the sound signal was emitted from Whimsea via a metal sounder in her hull. Another blip was appearing on the dial opposite the sixteen-foot mark. Whimsea rolled and lurched forward; the wreck loomed bigger and bigger. Suddenly the blip jumped back and forth, and settled up toward its mate at the zero end of the dial.
'Shit!' said Jim as he reversed and throttled up. But it was too late. There was a thump and a shudder, and then a slow heavy scraping sound. Whimsea stopped. It was falling tide; if we didn't get moving soon, we'd be there for the duration. Jim and I ran a flashlight all around the inside of the hull. Nothing. That was good at least. We had been going slow enough and reacted soon enough so that the boat was sill in one piece.
'What was it?'
'Dunno. But it was dumb to come in here. Why the hell do I listen to you? I suppose this place is full of shoals and rocks that aren't marked. Maybe they're big hunks of the James Longstreet, who knows? Of course it's not supposed to matter because we're not supposed to be here. And if the CG has to haul us off, we're going to
