68 Knots Read online

  “It might be great at times, but I wouldn’t want to be trapped in that life,” said Dawn FitzWilliam.

  “What do you mean?” Logan asked.

  Dawn shrugged. She wore her light brown hair in a ponytail she pulled through the space in the back of a red baseball cap, and she had a pleasant smile that could turn quickly into a pensive, distant look. “These ‘guests’ on your boat—why are they there? Because they like you personally, or because they like the boat, and the drinks, and the money, and the travel? This secretary—does she do things for you because she believes in you, because she cares about you—or because you pay her? This destination you decided to sail to—is it exotic? Mysterious? Or just the same old country-club stuff you can get anywhere? Remember, karma works in powerful ways. The way you treat the universe is reflected in the way the universe treats you.”

  Logan shrugged and flicked his red hair out of his face. “Wouldn’t matter to me, noooooway!” he said with a grin.

  They sailed on toward the sea’s horizon, passing the time with easy conversation. It was nearly three o’clock when Marietta sat on the rail next to Arthur. He was happy to have the chance to talk to her at last.

  “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’m getting hungry.”

  “So am I,” Arthur said, correcting the ship’s course just a little bit to keep the compass at 140 degrees. “Why don’t you see if McKinley wants us to start cooking.”

  Marietta looked at Arthur with a flirtatious smile. “I was hoping you would do that,” she said.

  “Sure,” Arthur answered. “Take the wheel for a minute.”

  Arthur went below and knocked on the door separating the main cabin from the forward section that contained the captain’s quarters. There was no sound. He knocked again, more loudly.

  “Commodore?” he called. “Could I talk to you?”

  There was no answer. Arthur knew that if McKinley were asleep in his cabin, he might not hear the knocking. He knocked again, waited, then tried the rusty knob. It was locked, so he jiggled and twisted it until something moved. He would tell McKinley that the door opened “accidentally.” He forced it open and entered the galley.

  Rum. The galley reeked of cheap rum. The smell was stronger near the captain’s quarters in the bow, and Arthur hesitated a moment. Then he knocked on the captain’s door anyway.

  There was no answer.

  “Commodore? Are you all right?” he shouted.

  Silence.

  This door was locked, too, and Arthur began to feel worried. He pushed against the door and twisted the knob. No luck. No sound from inside.

  “Commodore? Mr. McKinley? Hello?”

  This is getting scary, Arthur thought. He raised his right foot, took a deep breath, and kicked the door with all his strength. It burst open, and Arthur leapt inside.

  Three empty rum bottles lay on the table, along with two large bottles of prescription pills and several stacks of documents. The air stank of rum and vomit. McKinley lay on the bunk. He wasn’t moving. Arthur slapped his face. Shouted at him. Tried to lift him up.

  It was no use.

  McKinley was dead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “He left a note,” Arthur said grimly. The campers were sitting around the dining table, a large thick slab of wood drenched in heavy layers of polyurethane. The polyurethane was yellow and cracked in places, and it was peeling off one end. The scrawny fifteen-year-old named Bill Fiona—“Squinty”—fidgeted with one of the peeling strips as Arthur read the letter out loud:

  To whoever finds me,

  It’s all over. Everything. It’s over. There’s nothing left for me to do.

  My Leadership Cruise was the greatest idea of this century. It should have worked. It would have worked, except that people were against me from the start, like they always are. They were jealous of my success. The shipwrights. They ripped me off and damn near ended it all before it began. And the people who sold me the charts and the other stuff. They overcharged me—I have proof of it—and so I had to piece things together without the right gear.

  And the campers are worse than I expected. They are selfish, lazy, and stupid. Without my guidance, they might all die—and it would serve them right. They wouldn’t know leadership if it kicked them in the ass.

  But the worst of all were the counselors. I chose them myself—they were supposed to be like my children. But instead loyalty, they repaid my devotion with disrespect. With rudeness. With muniny. They should all be court-martled and fed to the sharks. Damn them all! They killed me. They might well have poured the pillls down my throat

  They’re working now. The pills. They’re working. I can feell them working. In just few minutes, Ill be gone and noone willl be able to find me and they won’t be able to say bad things about me or ripme off or shit like that. All thatshit. Just don’t let them get me. Bury me at sea like a sailor. I was in the Navy you kno. Not hardware store. Shit. Fuck you all.

  Howard McKinley Commodore

  The crew was silent for a long time. Joy was praying, reciting, “Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name,” alternating between English and Spanish. Arthur was ashen and silent. Marietta twirled her blond-streaked hair and looked bored.

  “If it meant so much to him,” Marietta said at last, “why did he work so hard to screw it up? I mean, he yelled at everybody. He made everybody miserable. He didn’t care about anybody except himself. Personally, I’m glad he’s gone. Let’s radio the stupid Coast Guard, go home, and have a normal summer for a change.”

  “I think he screwed it up because he wasn’t very good at things like this,” Arthur said. “I also found a bunch of files on his desk. He had them all laid out, like he was looking at them before he died.”

  “What were they?” Dawn asked.

  “Each file was about a business that McKinley started in the past,” Arthur said. “He had a desk job in the Navy for a while, but he left that and started some kind of restaurant in Savannah, Georgia.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that was a lovely place to dine,” Marietta said sarcastically.

  “Yeah,” Arthur said. “It closed after a couple of years when the chef suddenly quit. Then McKinley started a magazine in Norfolk, Virginia, that published nine times and then died. Then it was a public-relations company in Connecticut, which I think closed after a year or so. And then he bought the Dreadnought and started this Leadership Cruise thing.”

  “The guy was that much of a loser, and he wanted to teach people about leadership?” Marietta said. “Give me a break.”

  Arthur nodded. “So when the counselors left, he must have known that this job wasn’t going to work out for him, either. So he decided not to try anymore.”

  The teens were silent around the table. Then Bill Fiona spoke up. “I’m glad he left a note,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “We have to make sure no one thinks we killed him. I don’t want anyone to think we killed him. ’Cause of course we didn’t kill him. We didn’t kill him at all. Arthur, did you touch anything in the room? I hope no one thinks we killed him.”

  Arthur took a slow breath. “Of course I touched things,” he said. “I kicked in the door, I looked at the pill bottles, I grabbed McKinley, and I slapped him over and over again.”

  There was a gap of silence.

  “That must’ve felt good,” Logan said with a goofy grin. “Can I have a turn?”

  Arthur smiled tightly. “Get your own Commodore,” he said.

  The others laughed nervously. Then another pause.

  “So what do we do now?” Joy asked. Several of the teens talked at once, but Arthur tuned them out. He looked carefully around the table.

  There are eight of us, he thought. Four guys, four girls. Most of us are in decent shape—he couldn’t help glancing at Logan’s pudgy belly—and we’ve done pretty well during the last few days. With some training, we could have made a good crew. It’s too bad McKinley had to die before we could pull it all together. This
could have been great . . .

  Marietta was talking. “So we use the radio in McKinley’s room, we call the police or the Coast Guard or something, and we hand him over. To hell with this burial at sea crap. I say we hand over the body. No one is going to think we killed him—what are they going to say, that we forced him to take a bizillion pills and drink three bottles of rum?”

  Logan nodded. “We totally won’t be blamed for this,” he said. “The guy was obviously wacko, you know? Cooooooo-kooooo!”

  This could have worked out really well, Arthur thought. The problem was McKinley. If it weren’t for him, we would have done just fine. . . .

  “It sure is creepy, though,” Logan said, “sitting here talking while there’s a dead guy in the next room. I hope he doesn’t sit up and start yelling at us or something.”

  “Don’t worry,” Crystal said, grinning. “If he does, we’ll just get Arthur to smack him again.”

  The eight teenagers chatted around the table, feeling serious and grown-up and aghast as they talked about their situation. They joked a little, laughed nervously, and developed a plan. They would radio the Coast Guard, explain their situation, and follow instructions.

  “After all we’ve been through,” Joy said with a trembling smile, “it might actually be a pleasure to go home to my parents. We just need to find God’s will in all of this.”

  Why did we need McKinley at all? Arthur wondered. Sure, he provided the boat. And he organized the camp. But once we got started, what was he good for? All he did was make things difficult. We could do a lot better without him. . . .

  “This was supposed to be such a great summer,” Dawn said, her sweet smile momentarily sad, “sailing all over the place, getting to know people, getting back in touch with the sea and the natural air. Now I’ll have to go home, and my dad will probably make me get a job in his company for the summer. A real bummer.”

  “My parents are fine—I like living with them,” Joy said, “and I’d love to be closer to my boyfriend and my church. I could help with the choir and continue with my Bible studies. But spending the summer at home sure won’t be as useful as this was supposed to be. I was counting on this Leadership Cruise to teach me some things about organizing a congregation.”

  “My folks are a real bore,” Marietta said with a scowl. “I do not want to go home.”

  Arthur saw his opportunity.

  “Neither do I,” he said. “But who says we have to?”

  He paused to let the others think about that for a minute. Then he continued. “Look, our parents don’t expect us back until late August—three months from now. We have food, shelter, and supplies. McKinley was going to have us sail all around the Maine coast, so no one out there will know that anything has happened. We’ll just sail around and have a great summer. By ourselves. Without McKinley and his stupid orders. Our parents sent us here to learn some responsibility—what better way to learn it than by taking charge of our own lives? Right now. On this boat. With no one in charge except ourselves.”

  Stunned silence.

  “That’s crazy,” Marietta said.

  “Isn’t it illegal or something?” Joy asked.

  “Parts of it might be illegal—you’re right,” Arthur said. It is easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission, his father always said. “This boat doesn’t belong to us, for one thing. And we’ll have to do something with McKinley. But our parents paid a lot of money so we could sail this ship from June through August. As long as we’re clear that we’re bending certain parts of the law in favor of something more important, then that’s exactly what we’ll do.”

  More silence. Arthur enjoyed the attention, the control, the authority.

  “Look at it this way,” he continued. “We were promised a summer—an entire summer—on this boat. On this sea. That’s what our parents paid for. That’s what the brochure said we’d get. It’s not our fault that McKinley turned out to be an asshole. It’s not our fault that McKinley turned out to be a crook. Why should our summer be ruined just because McKinley’s life was a mess? His note is wrong. People weren’t trying to rip him off. The counselors weren’t traitors. And we aren’t lazy or stupid. McKinley just tried to charge a lot of money for this camp and keep most of it for himself. It didn’t work. That’s his fault. He failed and so he killed himself. But where does that leave us? He kills himself, so we have to act like children? He can’t control his own life, so we have to go home? He can’t handle his own stupidity, so we have to go crawling back to our parents? Says who? Who out there is making that decision for us? I think we should make our own decisions. I think we should make our own plans. I think we should set our own course.”

  He paused for just a moment.

  “And I intend to stay on board,” he said. “This is my summer—my life—and I won’t let McKinley mess it up for me.”

  There was another moment of dropped-jaw silence. Then, at last, Logan pushed his red hair out of his eyes and asked, “What’ll we do if someone, like, gets hurt or sick?”

  Arthur couldn’t resist a small smile. He knew a “yes” when he heard one. “We’ll take them to the hospital,” Arthur said. “We’ll use the Leadership Cruise’s insurance, which is insurance that our parents paid for.”

  “What if we get lost or sink the boat?” asked Bill, wiping his nose on his arm. “We’d be in trouble if we got lost or sank the boat. What would we do if we got lost or sank the boat?”

  “We’d radio the Coast Guard,” Arthur said. “Just like McKinley would have done—I hope.”

  “I think this sounds stupid,” Marietta said. “We’ll get ourselves killed.”

  “I think it sounds wonderful,” Dawn said. All eyes looked at her. Her eyes sparkled from beneath her baseball-cap brim. “Think of it. A whole summer of sailing and swimming and sleeping on a great old ship. Just us and Goddess Earth and the great powerful sea. At one with the ocean, at peace with the world. It’s not like we’re eight years old. We’re perfectly capable of doing this by ourselves, and all the spirits of the sea will join together to help us. I think we can do it better than McKinley ever could.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Marietta said.

  “Like hell it is,” Crystal said. “I’m with Shortstop here. There’s no fucking way I’m going back to my parents for the summer. I’d rather be fighting to save my ass in some bitch of a hurricane than sitting at home watching my parents eat ice cream and listen to baseball on the radio. I vote for staying. Hell, if I had thought of this before, I would’ve killed the fat old geezer myself.”

  “Here’s what I think we should do,” Arthur said. “I think we should put it to a vote. We don’t need everyone to stay on board—some people can go home if they want to—but we’ll need at least five of us to work the ship and do the cooking and everything. And whoever goes home has to promise not to tell anyone what we’re doing.”

  The teenagers glanced at each other as they thought about Arthur’s plan. They weighed the risks of continuing against the prospect of spending the summer at home. They tried to imagine life on board, free and exciting, and they compared that image to life under the control of parents and guardians at home.

  Jesse—the “Hulk”—cleared his throat. “I’m in,” he said in a strong bass voice. “I won’t abandon the ship.”

  “That makes two of us,” Arthur said, looking around at the others. “Who else will join us?”

  “I will,” Dawn said.

  “I totally will too,” said Logan.

  Seven of the eight agreed to stay, with Marietta the only holdout. She shook her head. “You’re all crazy, and I think you’re going to get in a lot of trouble,” she said. “I’m going home.”

  “Suit yourself,” Arthur said. “We have enough people to work the ship. I’m sure you’ll do just fine—serving fries at McDonald’s, hanging out at the mall, taking care of your little brothers and sisters, spending evenings at home helping your mom do the dishes. And don’t worry about us. We’l
l manage somehow—sailing along the coast, holding cookouts on remote islands, going shopping in cities up and down the seaboard, singing and telling stories . . .”

  “All right!” Marietta said. “All right. I still think it’s stupid, but you convinced me. Count me in.”

  Arthur smiled. “Well, everyone, we just promoted ourselves. Thanks to McKinley, most of us were ‘cabin boys’ and ‘cabin girls’ yesterday. Well, I now declare that you are all First Mates of the schooner Dreadnought. And as our first piece of official business, I say we dump McKinley’s stupid nicknames. What do you say? Bunny? Squinty? Marshmallow?”

  The vote was unanimous.

  With awkward fumbling and clumsy lurches, they took the Dreadnought several miles out to sea, far from any other ships. Then they let her sails luff, and the entire crew, dressed in the best clothes they had on board, gathered together on the deck. Logan told some jokes about the devil and the deep blue sea. Dawn sat in a yoga position and offered a chant to the Goddess of the Maritimes. And Joy held her hands close together in deep and fervent prayer, a mixture of whispered words and spiritual communion.

  McKinley’s body lay on a long plank beneath an American flag. Jesse had volunteered for the unpleasant task of carrying the body up from below, placing it on the plank, and tying heavy bolts and clamps to its arms and legs. In a soft voice, Joy read some lines from the Bible she carried with her throughout the ship:

  While the people pressed upon him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret. And he saw two boats by the lake; but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. And when he had ceased speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” And when they had done this, they enclosed a great shoal of fish; and as their nets were breaking, they beckoned to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching people.”