John D. MacDonald

Built for Speed

I was sitting on my heels on the gas dock having a cold can of beer with Russ, the dockmaster, arguing about whether I ought to put squat boards on the Davidson cruiser. My small boatyard is around the corner from the Messina Yacht Club docks. Russ knows boats, and when I’m not too sure of myself I go over and yak with him.

It was a glass-calm September afternoon, and the boat basin had the sleepy look it had had all summer. About a third of the slips were in use. Most of the regulars had put their craft in fresh-water storage or on ways and had gone north away from the long, hot, sleepy summer of the west coast of Florida. My own storage department was full, and I had spent the summer doggedly digging my way through the backlog of work the boat owners had left for me when they headed north.

There was just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes off the end of the gas dock. Russ interrupted his dissertation on squat boards and looked out the boat-basin entrance toward the big bay. I turned and looked, too, and we squatted in silence for a time, watching the strange boat coming in. She was fast and she had good lines and she was sparkling in the sun.

“Know her?” I asked Russ.

“Can’t say I do. She isn’t standard, either.” He didn’t have to say that. I could see by the lines of her that she hadn’t been stamped out like a cookie.

She curved into the narrow entrance with the bone in her teeth, and then the engines were cut down and she settled lower in the water and came burbling up to the dock. The color scheme was white and gray and deep blue, and the brass was polished. A girl stood spread-legged on the bow, the coiled line in her hand. She wore a scanty, yellow two-piece sun suit, and she took tan like an Indian, a deep red-bronze. The sun had bleached her hair almost white. We stood up. Something about her, a sort of insolence in the way she stood there, with her long, smooth legs, made me conscious of my ragged, faded khaki shorts, my bare feet, the grease on my hands.

It was about thirty-five feet of boat, and the guy at the wheel was an expert. He reversed his screws just right and drifted up, turning, and came up against the padded pilings as gently as a baby’s kiss. She leaped lightly off instead of tossing us the line. Expertly, she made it fast, and the guy left the wheel and tossed me a stern line, saying, “Thanks, boy.”

Something about the man gave me an impulse to throw his line back aboard. He was a short, dark guy who looked about forty. He had plenty of shoulders and a square, sun-dark face. He wore a white shirt with the tails tied across his flat, brown belly in the Mexican fashion. Hair was thick and curly black on his chest. He wore pale linen shorts, and his short legs were bowed and muscular.

I made his line fast and stepped back. The girl glanced at me and looked away. Young. Nineteen or twenty.

“You like gas, mister?” Russ asked.

“Gas, ice, supplies and a place to tie up.”

I moved back to where I could see the transom. She was the Go Girl out of New Orleans. And she looked as if she could go. The young blonde got the key and took the tank covers off, and the man started the blowers. Russ went over with the hose and tried to hand the man the nozzle.

“Come aboard and put it in yourself,” the man told him.

I waited for the explosion. Russ is a character. He’s a damn good dockmaster, and so the club keeps him on in spite of his having a tendency to toss cash customers off the dock when they get too large for their breeches. But the stranger had a very commanding air. He looked mean and important and sure of himself, and to my surprise Russ went aboard, saying meekly, “How much do you need?”

“Top ’em off.”

I looked at the panel and wondered how much power she had. The panel resembled something off a B29. She didn’t look like a heavy-weather boat. She was too slim.

The owner turned toward the girl and said, “You forgot where that key goes?” His voice was sarcastic and unpleasant.

“No, Ralph, but I’ll need it to tighten—”

“Put it where it belongs!” he yelled.

You could have heard him over in the bar of the club. She didn’t answer him. She went by him, sort of sidling when she was closest to him, and put the key where he wanted it. The back of Russ’s neck looked more red than tan. It had been a petty scene and a pointless humiliation of the girl, and yet you could sense that it wasn’t anything particularly unusual.

To sort of lake the strain out of the air, I said, “Nice wagon. Where was she made?”

He looked at me just long enough for me to begin to wonder whether he’d answer me at all. And if he didn’t, I couldn’t think what in the world I was going to do about it.

“I had her made in Virginia,” he said. “She was designed in New York. She’s got four hundred horses, she weighs six ton, she’ll cruise all day at twenty-four knots and hit a top of thirty-three.”

He looked at me for another three seconds and then turned his back. He hadn’t spoken in the way a proud owner speaks of his boat. He had sounded bored, and as though he had given me all that other information to stop the conversation right there.

She took on a bit over eighty gallons. The girl got the key and twisted the tank covers down tight while the owner came up onto the dock and started reeling off the list of things he wanted, going so fast that Russ had to ask him again so he could get everything written down. Russ showed him where to tie up, and asked him to sign the dock book.

The owner scrawled his name and said, looking around the boat basin, “Is there anybody around here that knows anything about marine engines?” The way he said it, it made the club look shabby, and made the whole town look small and sleepy and forgotten.

Russ glanced at me, and then said, “Joe Rutland here is pretty good, Mr. Barrow.”

Barrow turned and gave me another long stare, and he looked a little skeptical. “What experience have you got, Rutland?”

That was a shade too much, even for me. I looked him in the eye and gave him a face-cracker drawl and said, “I just bang on ’em a little with a wrench and see what happens.”

His jaw muscles popped out like walnuts and I had the crazy idea he was going to take one step forward and swing on me, in spite of my six extra inches of height and twenty-five pounds of weight. His face relaxed slowly.

“I asked you a question.”

“If you’ve got something wrong with it, you can bring it over to my yard tomorrow and I’ll take a look at it. The dockmaster will tell you how to get there.”

“I’ll pay twice the freight if you’ll look at it right now.”

“Without references?”

“I’ll take a chance that you know what you’re doing.”

That was damn white of him. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him about M.I.T. and designing marine diesels and about the Navy engineering rating, because he was the type to start patronizing me by asking me why I’d stuck myself away in this sleepy Gulf-coast town. And the answer to that was emotional rather than professional. I’d run out on a high-pressure job, and on a high-pressure, double-dealing wife, bought into the yard with what little she left me, went around feeling sorry for myself for a couple of years, and finally realized that I was having a fine time and this was what I should have done in the first place. When Marty got sick, I bought him out, and I’d fixed up an apartment for myself in the back end of the main shop and things were fine, thank you.

I decided it would be childish to turn down the job. I told him I’d take a look at it, and asked him what the trouble was.

“The port engine, Rutland. At cruising speed it works fine. Every time I load it, it will run for three or four minutes and then start spitting and knocking and missing. Then I have to idle it ’way down for five minutes or so before it will even run smoothly at cruising speed.”

“Then let’s run out and overload it.”

“Don’t you want to get tools?”

“I want to know what’s wrong with it first.” Barrow turned to Russ. “Get the rest of the stuff together. The ice can wait until we come back in. Cast off the stern line.”

We went aboard. The girl handled the bow line. He didn’t give her much time. He swung out so fast that he gave her a hell of a long leap. She stumbled and cracked her knee, and I saw her grimace of pain.

“Watch it, Ginny!” he yelled at her.

When we were outside the entrance he gave the boat full throttle. I stood beside him and watched the rpms. They climbed and steadied at forty-two hundred. The Go Girl had a lot of guts. It was a thrill to be on her. She was delicate and responsive.

He heeled around the red channel marker and away we went, heading down the big bay toward the distant Gulf. I lifted the hatch on the port engine. It was a special job. I thumbed grease from the plate. British. I squatted and listened. She ran smooth as could be and then began to pop and miss. I motioned to him to throttle them both down. The stern rode high for a moment on our own wake and then she lay steady in the water. I lifted the other engine hatch.

“Why are you looking at that one?” he demanded.

I ignored the question. That’s the privilege of all mechanics. I had a pretty good idea of the trouble, and a close look at the starboard engine verified it. I closed the engine hatches.

“We can take her in.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“I’ll have to check the book to make sure, but I don’t think the plugs on the port side have the same rating as the ones in the starboard engine. It’s a new set, I see, and I think you’re overloading them. If the book says they have the same rating, then I’m wrong.”

“My God, that was easy enough.” he said, and he smiled for the first time. It didn’t make him look any more pleasant. It just stretched his lips and narrowed his eyes.

He swung the Go Girl around and we headed back. We passed a dinghy with a couple of kids fishing. He didn’t slow for them. The wash nearly upended the dinghy. He knew I saw it. He turned toward me and said, over the engine roar, “They can do their damn fishing away from the channel.”

“If they’d gone over, we were going back, Barrow.”

“Not in this boat.”

“In this boat.” I don’t know why I had to act hard with the man. I’m a peaceful type.

He stared at me and then let out a whoop of laughter. The girl was sitting in a Buddha pose on the bow. She turned and looked back with an expression of surprise. I guessed it wasn’t a sound she heard often.

He was still grinning to himself when we eased into the slip Russ had assigned him. I helped the girl get out the four lines. I measured the tide level with my eye, and slacked off the bow lines a bit. She worked with silent competence. I took another look at the numbers on the plugs and walked back to the yard. I checked the chart. It had been a good guess. I took a new set out of stock, plus a wrench, pliers and gap gauge and went back to the Go Girl.

A man was taking ice aboard. The girl had evidently just finished hosing off the boat. She was coiling a crimson hose to stow it in a locker. Barrow wasn’t around. The ice man went away after she paid him from a straw purse.

She looked shyly at me and said. “My husband said for you to go right ahead.”

I didn’t like to hear her say husband. I’d been doing some ridiculous daydreaming. I wanted him to be boss, father, big brother — anything but husband. My first impression of her, the impression of arrogance, had been wrong. She was a big, shy blonde girl with something terribly subdued about her.

I took two plugs out of the good motor to get a double check on the gap. It didn’t take long to install the new set of plugs. I could feel the girl watching me. The silence seemed awkward.

“Take long to get here from New Orleans?”

“We came straight across from Vera Cruz.”

I gathered up the plugs I had replaced, closed the hatches. “Bad time of year to try that.”

“We’ve got a ship-to-shore and we can outrun bad weather.”

I looked at her and noticed the bruise on her knee. I smiled at her. “Your husband has got a pretty sharp crew. Mrs. Barrow.”

She gave a nervous glance along the dock, along where he would have to come when he returned. It showed me how vulnerable she was.

“I’ve — spent a lot of time around boats. I guess.”

It was obvious that she wanted me to go away. Her eyebrows were pale-bleached against her heavy tan. Sometimes it is too easy to be a damn fool. She wanted me to go, and I didn’t want to go. I wanted to know more about these people and this marriage. I guess I was getting a White Knight complex or something. I had nominated her princess, and I didn’t like her being married to him, and I didn’t think she liked it very much, either.

“Where are you going from here?”

“Down to the Keys and over to Cuba.”

I could see below, see the bunks with their tailored coverings, the gleam and newness of everything, a rack of heavy boat rods, jeweled reels glistening. Everything was in its place. It was a shipshape, sterile world.

The rods gave me another gambit. “Do much fishing?”

“Sometimes.”

There are some couples you see and the idea of sex between them is slightly unbelievable. But with other couples they seem to represent maleness and femaleness, and you can sense somehow that their relationship is predominately physical. She was young and beautifully constructed and she had an indicative ripeness. And he was male as a clenched fist. The boat began to make me oddly uncomfortable. It was the flavor of them, I guess, a sensing of a relationship that was not good. I stepped across to the dock. When I looked back she was kneeling on the bow rubbing a polishing rag hard against the brightwork, her pale, sun-harsh hair swinging against her cheek with the rhythm of her work.

A breeze freshened with the dusk that night, and I do not know whether it was an urge to prove something that made me change, after my shower and shave, to silk shantung slacks the color of beach sand and an Egyptian cotton shirt. The slacks had been in the back of the closet and the shirt on the bottom of the pile in the bureau. We don’t wear jackets at the club in summer. I gave grease-darkened knuckles an extra scrubbing. Before I left my place I took a long look in the mirror, trying to be objective, wondering why I had been awarded a face more suitable to a retired heavyweight than to the young man of distinction which, on this evening, I wished to be, for some ungodly reason.

Our club bar is plaintively tropical, with rattan and bamboo. Some of the guys were drinking beer at a corner of the bar. Kister studied me and whistled low and asked me if I was making like a tourist. I told him to fit his head into his beer shell. I had Raoul make me a martini because I felt in a martini mood. While I was sipping it I saw Barrow alone at one of the tables in a dark corner. I hadn’t seen him before.

“Rutland!” he said. “Come on over here a minute.” The voice of command. It silenced the guys at the bar. Barrow was the damnedest man. Always keeping you right on the edge of an obligatory scene.

I went on over and sat down on invitation — or command. “Took her out again. You did a fine job. She’s sweet now. She takes the full load. What do I owe you?”

“Call it twenty.”

“I promised double.”

“That’s already double.”

He put a twenty and a ten on the table. I stared at it and then shrugged and picked it up. As I folded the bills and tucked them in my shirt pocket, I realized that he was very drunk. It hadn’t affected his speech. It was just that my eyes were getting used to the dimness, and I saw the slack hang of the face that had been so squared and rigid before, saw the opaque glaze of the eyes that had been so snapping-black. He had a brandy bottle on the table. He poured himself another drink with a hand that was too steady, a motion that was too deliberate. And he started to drink it in the same way.

I got up and said, “See you around.”

He didn’t answer. He was looking out the big bar window toward where the dusk was hiding the boats at anchor. I had a few more martinis. He was more than ever the dragon to be slain.

With the courage of gin. I went for a walk on the docks to the Go Girl. It was too dark to see into the cockpit. Then I heard her slap hard at a mosquito and I made her out, sitting there in a pale dress in one of the chairs.

“Mr. Rutland?” she asked in that hushed privacy of voices at night.

“Yes. Mrs. Barrow.” I could smell insect repellant.

“How is... Have you seen him?”

“He’s at the club. In the bar.”

There was a long silence. I was not invited aboard. She said, “Will you do me a favor?”

“Of course, Mrs. Barrow.”

“Watch him. Get him back here to the boat when he — when he should come back.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Thank you very much.”

The boat rocked in the basin, a slow sound of the creak of lines and hull slap of ripples and soft nudge of fenders. There was a party on another boat on the other side of the basin. Suddenly all the people there laughed at once. A good punch line, I guessed.

“Can I bring you a drink or anything?”

“You better go watch him.”

I went and watched him. It didn’t take too long, because he went at it with method, with a slow and dogged intentness. He was being watched with a certain amount of awe by the regulars in the bar. His elbow slid off the table and his head thumped against the wooden edge of the table He sat like that. I went over to him and got him to his feet, holding him upright. Kister wanted to help me. I told him I could manage. Barrow was heavy, but he had little use of his legs left. His head lolled. He muttered incomprehensible things. I got him out into the night and down the long dock to their ship and kept him from lurching into the water.

Getting him aboard was a trick. She snubbed the boat closer and once he slipped and she had to take most of his weight and I heard her grunt with the effort of it. We got him below and she turned on a light and we got him onto the bunk. She took off his shoes and picked the knot free in the white shirt, exposing his heavily haired brown chest, sweat-beaded in the light.

She slapped him sharply twice, saying, “Ralph! Ralph!” He didn’t stir or make a sound. He was out.

She blocked the narrow space between the bunks. She looked at me in the light and something had happened to her face. It wasn’t good to look at. A sort of gloating. A sort of evil freedom. And she turned out the light.

My eyes were not used to darkness and I thought she was going topside until I felt her hands on my shoulders and she thrust herself heavily against me, missing my mouth with hers, then nuzzling and finding it. She was young and husky and she levered us toward the other bunk so that I lost balance and we toppled awkwardly onto it. Her intentions were unmistakable, but any desire I had felt for her was destroyed by the circumstances. I did not wish to be made an instrument of revenge for petty cruelty and too much humiliation. She sensed quickly that I was trying to get free, and she took her eager arms from me and lay still in darkness.

“Do you want to go to some other place?” she asked in too cold and conversational a voice.

“No.”

I left her there. He had begun to snore. I went topside and leaped up onto the dock and walked away. My face was sweating. I could smell her insect-repellant on me. I felt like a prude. Yet I knew that had I guessed it was that way in the beginning I would have gone along with it — not there, but in my place. But I had guessed the script wrong. And I had liked my script better. Then I thought of other ports and other nights and of how many times she had perhaps taken her revenge, and I felt full of virtue.

But I did not sleep well. I woke up in the morning and thought of her, thought of how it would be like picking up the thirty dollars on the dark table. I wanted them to stay over another night. But when I walked out to the docks I saw the Go Girl outside the entrance and saw her leap forward into full speed, heeling sweetly around the channel marker to drone down the bay to the Summer Gulf, and as she went out of sight I thought I saw her standing on the bow, coiling a line.

Russ spat into the water. It was a comment. “How was Mr. Barrow this morning?”

“The son of a bitch. That child bride of his didn’t jump fast enough and he cuffed her across the back of the neck and damn near knocked her overboard. Hope he never comes back.”

Of course, he never has and he never will because it was that month that the big one came grinding up out of the Caribbean and the search boys lost it for a while. It didn’t cover much of an area but it had winds of maximum intensity. The town boarded up, but it wheeled out again and missed us and hit the Texas coast finally with diminished force, dropping a billion gallons of heavy rain. At one point during its random journey, it swallowed the Go Girl. There was a piece in the paper. It indicated that Barrow had been an important man in Louisiana.

I thought about the Go Girl on the floor of the Gulf, and I thought about her drowned hair, and how it is always green down there, with pale luminosity where the storms never reach. That should be the end of the story, of course. And it is meaningless, and what happened later may give it some meaning which I have not yet been able to understand.

Kister was drunk one night. Amiably drunk, his big face red and sweating, and we were alone in the bar and he put his hand on my shoulder and said. “Been meaning to tell you sometime. Joe boy. You remember that Barrow drunk and the Go Girl that got lost, and the blondie? Well, kid, you were the boy scout and took hubby home, but old Kister got the reward. You weren’t on the ball that night, believe me, and let me tell you, kiddo, it was something. It was really some—”

In an almost instinctive reaction. I slapped his hand off my shoulder, turning, fist cocked, and I came frighteningly close to smashing his mouth. I don’t know what stopped me. Perhaps it was the realization that he looked, under the bluster, embarrassed and perhaps ashamed.

When I dropped my hand he said, “What goes?” And he sounded put upon.

“Just drop it.”

“Where do you figure? No reason to get sore because—”

“Please drop it,” I said, and left the bar and the club.

I went out and sat on my heels on the end of the gas dock. There were a lot of stars that night. I wanted to stop thinking about Kister and I couldn’t. I wanted people to come along who would fit the things in my head. But they always came along and were out of focus. You can’t tell the knights from the dragons without a score card.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Built for Speed