Read Online Time Bandit by Andy Hillstrand - Free Book Online

picking salmon and cranking the reel. I lit the charcoal bag with my Bic. Flames erupted from the bag and nearly set my hair on fire. In only minutes I had a barbecue in the making and my mouth was watering. The charcoal was burning bright in blue flames fanned by the breezes of the Inlet. And then by accident I caught my boot on the Weber’s leg, and the charcoal spilled over the deck. I quickly kicked the coals out a scupper. They hissed like angry snakes on the cold sea. I looked at the salmon fillets with yearning and put them back on ice.
    With lunch a miss, I look through cabinets unopened in two years to discover a Sony shortwave radio under the instrument console. I find AA batteries and I search the dial for a weather station. As I tune the radio, I catch Dido’s song, White Flag, with its refrain, “I will go down with this ship.” I spook; she is a miserable quitter and a bad omen to a fisherman. No one goes down with the ship willingly, in advance, like she says she wants to do. You fight to your last breath to stay alive. Her message is a travesty. What kind of a signal does she send young people? Quit?
    Truly, this coincidence of my situation and hearing this song freaks me out. I throw the radio overboard like it is a bomb. It will do me no good; I am at the mercy of nature that no radio announcement is going to change. I need another boat to come close enough to see me waving my arms. The only announcement that will do me a bit of good is a sign from another boat that it has seen me. My heart is pounding. I am glad the radio is gone. Weird occurrences like that have explanations, like a spirit from beyond trying to tell me something I don’t want to hear.
    That reminds me of the day our dad died. At the time, I was screwing a woman in a motel room, and suddenly, I could feel him in the room like his spirit was watching me. I quit what I was doing. I was embarrassed. The woman asked me what was wrong. I said nothing. I was thinking, My dad died. I did not learn about his death until the following day. I lay there staring at the ceiling. I truly believe in spirits. No one who works on the sea can help but have strong spiritual beliefs.
    Sometimes, these take the form of superstitions, and I respect that. I feel small in the universe when I am at sea in an 80-knot blow. I am staring into the abyss. The edge of the earth is over the horizon. I have not yet gone off that edge, but I have seen it. I know my insignificance. I acknowledge that something out there unseen is much larger than me. And I live or I die according to the whim of that presence. That is all there really is. That is what the sea has taught me.
    Dad died unexpectedly during a medical emergency flight from Homer to Anchorage. He had been fighting pneumonia. The news devastated my brothers and me. Andy and I visited his body at the funeral home in Homer. My stepmother did not allow the undertaker to embalm him. She is an environmentalist. The funeral director wanted to sell us a coffin for $15,000. We decided on the spot to build one. The director said, “I’ll give you a piece of advice, young men. Most people, when they try to build a coffin, build it too small. That makes eternity uncomfortable for the dearly deceased. And the relatives end up coming in here and buying a coffin. You could save yourself the trouble….”
    We did not exactly build Dad a coffin, but we did not buy him one either. We built him a boat with a bow and a propeller and rope handles made of fishing line. We christened her The Journey and we designed her length at 6 foot 9 inch, which gave Dad plenty of legroom. We painted the “hull” black like the Time Bandit, and we wrote on the sides sayings like “Here’s Johnny!” and signed our names. Building the coffin helped us to grieve and made us tighter as brothers. As we worked with saws and hammers, we told stories, like one in particular that made us laugh. It typified my dad. One day he was in the front yard