Read Online Buried At Sea by Paul Garrison - Free Book Online Page A

chops, cooked veal and sausage stews, and legs of lamb. Halfway down on the right he found a plastic bag of sliced apples, brown sugar, quince, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, and nutmeg—one of a dozen Will had prepared before he set sail.
    The weather fax machine in the nav station beeped. "Check it out?" said Will. "See what'
    s coming our way."
    Jim picked up the paper flowing from the printer. Superimposed across the weather map for the eastern equatorial Atlantic were three lines of computer-generated block print. NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, NOT EVEN A CLOD ON A YACHT. COMMUNICATE.
    BEFORE WE CATCH A THIEF.
    "What the heck is this?" He recognized the fractured John Donne from Ren Lit. But how had it gotten into a public broadcast of the weather report?
    "Will, look at this."
    Will scanned it. "Son of a bitch?' he whispered under his breath. Then he read aloud, affecting nonchalance. " `No man is an island, not even a clod on a yacht.' Oh, very clever."
    "Who's it from?" asked Jim.
    "A poet who didn't know it." Will crumpled the sheet and climbed halfway up the companionway to toss it to the wind.
    Jim stared at him, wondering whether Will's explanation about why he couldn't call the cops was bullshit. Was Will the criminal? Were the mysterious "they" the law?
    "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but faxes will never hurt me." He slid his hand under the waxed paper, placed the pan upside down over the rolled dough, and flipped it into the pan. Quickly he fluted the edges of the crust, shaping the dough between his thumbs and index fingers.
    "But how did that message get into the weather fax?"
    "I told you, they are powerful. If it can be done, they can do it. How? Either they hacked their way in or they bribed some underpaid technician to look the other way. Pie filling, please."
    "What do they mean, 'communicate'? Could it be an offer to negotiate?"
    "If we were to slip this pie in the oven for an hour, we could build an appetite with a spinning class." "Communicate or else?"
    "Empty threat," said Will. "This poet who doesn't know it is stuck behind a PC
    somewhere and we're safe in the middle of the ocean—as long as we keep our eyes peeled for ships. Ships are a threat. They've got their hooks into the big shipping companies, the Russian merchant fleets, the oil company tankers, offshore towing outfits, Taiwanese container ships, the Dutch, the—"
    "Every ship in the world?"
    "The fleets, where they know the owners. That's why we're keeping our eyes peeled. Spinners on deck, Herr Instructor. Mach schnell!"
    They showered the sweat off under the fire hose—pumping warm, salty seawater over each other on the foredeck. The pie, with Breyer's vanilla ice cream from the freezer, tasted like no pie Jim had ever eaten: the apples seemed like an impossible combination of tart and sweet, and the crust was crisp and airy.
    I'm like Shannon's cat, he thought. All good things come from Will. If Will opens the door and fills my food dish, I eat. If he freaks out and jumps overboard, I drift until I sink. I either starve or have to go hunting on my own. That's where the analogy breaks down. I don't know how to hunt.
    "Where'd you learn your table manners?"
    "What?"
    "You know how to use a knife and fork. I don't meet many thirty-year-olds who do. Our '
    gold rush' economy spawns frontier manners. You have ... habits."
    "My mother was a nut for properness. Drove me and my dad nuts with it. 'We may not have money, but we use a proper linen napkin.' That sort of thing."
    "Sounds like an old-fashioned upbringing."
    "They were older and I think my mother, at least, thought things had been better in the past."
    "What did your father think?"
    "He didn't say. . . . He thought it was bullshit, but he went along. . . . He was an old hippie. Love and peace at any cost."
    "Sounds like Mom was a force to be reckoned with." "Shannon says she was a control freak at home because she couldn't make it in the real world."
    "What do you