Chapter Eleven

Hep woke up because the sun was shining in his face. Which was not right. He opened his eyes, and realized he was laying on the sidewalk. Which was not right. And he was covered with a scratchy wool blanket he’d never seen before.

Which was not right.

He sat up and looked around. About one hundred feet away was the ramp down to the docks. He took a look at his watch, and saw it was about eight thirty in the morning. He ached the way a person who has spent the night passed out on a sidewalk aches, which is to say, quite a lot. The best thing to do, he decided, was to stand up. After he stood up, everything would be obvious.

Hep stood up, and stretched. He looked around again, and didn’t see anything that jumped his memory. He looked at the blanket he’d slept under. It was brown, with a blocky pattern on it, and it smelled vaguely of perfume and cigarettes. He folded it up, looked around to see if he could figure out where the blanket might live when it wasn’t covering him on the sidewalk, but didn’t see anything, so he set it down on the sidewalk where he’d been. Perhaps the owner, or someone who needed it more than him, would find it.

In his pocket, he found a scrap of paper and a pen. He wrote “Thank you!” on the paper, and left it on top of the blanket, with a rock holding it in place.

He decided he’d better get down to the boat and get ready to leave. When Hep reached the boat, he saw a single red high heeled shoe laying on the deck. Which was not right.

He climbed aboard, and saw an inflatable alligator sticking out of the companionway. Not right. He pulled the alligator out of the hatch and tossed it aside.

On the one hand, he knew that he was going to regret going into the cabin. On the other hand, he knew he more or less had to get down there and find out what damage might have been caused over the last twelve hours. Hep took a deep breath, and climbed down into the cabin.

It was worse than he imagined it might be.

So far as he could tell, every loose item in the cabin had been thrown in to some other part of the cabin. Books, spare parts, cutlery, dishes, towels, cushions, pillows, everything was some place it shouldn’t have been. There was a bra hanging off the chimney of a kerosene lantern, and the red high heel to match the one Hep had found on deck was in the sink in the head. The kitchen sink was filled with what Hep hoped was just baked beans. He noticed the lengths of rope he used to practice knots with were missing.

He kind of pushed the mess to one side as he walked, looking down to make sure he didn’t step in anything foul.

“Scroat?” Hep said as he approached the stateroom they’d been sleeping in for the last leg of their voyage.

Just then, Hep heard a frantic pounding from somewhere, and a muffled, masculine, voice saying “Let me out!”

He found the source of the noise under a pile of cushions and women’s undergarments. He opened the locker and was surprised to see a man he’d never met staring wild eyed out at him.

“Who are you?” Hep asked the man in the locker.

“Who the fuck are you?” said the main in the locker, as he climbed out. “This has gone too far for me. Fuck you guys, I’m going back to my own boat.”

The stranger stomped up the ladder, and Hep heard him take three steps across the deck, and the smack of shoes landing on the dock.

“That wasn’t right,” Hep said. He started walking forward to their stateroom again. “Scroat? What the hell, man?”

He heard someone, Scroat, moaning in discomfort. He sounded extremely hung over. When he reached their stateroom, he saw Scroat hanging head first off the top bunk. Naked. His feet were tied to a couple of wooden posts that were intended to hold up a shelf for a sailor’s personal effects.

On the bunk Hep normally slept on, were two naked women tangled together, their makeup smeared and hair in complete disarray. Hep recognized them from the bar. Which was kind of strange. Strange that he could see them well enough to recognize them, not strange that he did recognize them.

Hep then noticed their stateroom seemed unusually bright. It was normally very dim, even during the brightest hours of the day. That was when he noticed the hole knocked in the side of the boat. It was easily a foot and a half in diameter. He could see the neighboring boat through the hole.

“Oh, that’s really not right.”

Scroat rubbed his eyes, and blinked up at Hep.

“How the fuck are you standing on the ceiling?” Scroat said.

“I’m not, you’re hanging upside down.”

“Oh.”
Scroat seemed as though he wasn’t exactly sure what to do next.

“You don’t have any coffee do you?”

“No,” Hep said. “What did you do to the boat, man? Poseidon is going to be back here in no time.”

He checked his watch. It said it was eight forty-five.

“We’ve got fifteen minutes to make this place halfway presentable, and you’re going to be in charge of explaining the hole in the boat there.”

Scroat looked over at the hole. “Never saw that before. Hey, how about giving me a hand up?”

Hep rolled his eyes, grabbed Scroat’s shoulders and lifted him back up on to his bed.

“Thanks,” Scroat said. He sat up and started untying his ankles. One of the women stirred, but did not wake up.

“So, uh, who was the guy you had locked up under a pile of cushions?”

“What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t remember any one here except for me and two women. We came back here after you passed out on the sidewalk.”

“So that blanket belonged to one of them?”

“What blanket? And what guy? Quit changing topics on me here, I think I’ve been hanging upside down for a long time. I came back here with the two women from the bar, and we fooled around a little bit. What’s the problem?”

“Look at this mess, Scroat! It’s a problem. It’s a big problem. It’s a problem that you had some guy locked up who, apparently, didn’t really want to be locked up. Poseidon, you know, our host, is going to be back any minute, and then there’s really going to be a problem.”

“Hey, I don’t remember any guy, and I don’t know what mess you’re talking about,” Scroat hopped down from the bunk, and saw the two women on the lower bunk.

“What the fuck are they doing here still?”

“You tell me.”

Scroat wandered, still naked, past Hep and looked at the mess. It looked as though they’d been burglarized by a tornado.

“Holy fuck,” he muttered. “I don’t think I made that mess.”

Scroat looked down at himself then, and saw all the new cuts and bruises he had in strange places.

“But maybe I did.” He found a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and quickly got dressed.

One of the women tapped Hep on the shoulder.

“Um. Are my clothes out there?” she asked.

“Maybe, I’m not sure. Have a look,” Hep said.

She squeezed past him and Scroat, and saw the wreckage.

“Wow, some night we had,” she said. “Oh! That’s mine,” she said, and grabbed a pair of panties. She put them on, then resumed hunting for her clothes. She moved a cushion and a folding bicycle to one side, and picked up a skirt. She found a bra and a shirt twisted together.

“These must be Cindi’s,” she said, and set them on a shelf that was free of clutter.

Hep and Scroat watched her in disbelief as she found the rest of her clothes, and “Cindi’s.”

“Um. Do you remember what happened last night?” Hep asked.

She looked slightly embarassed, and said, “Well, you passed out when we were all on the way back to the boat, so I went back to my car and brought you a blanket so you wouldn’t freeze. Scroat and Cindi waited, and we came down to the boat and partied.”

“Who was the guy in the locker?” Hep asked.

“What guy?”

“OK. So, did you guys make this mess?”

“Oh, yeah. Scroat’s a wild man, and I guess we got kind of carried away.”

“I guess,” Hep said.

Cindi said, from behind Hep, “Where are my clothes?”

“They’re out here,” the other woman said in response.

“Sorry, what’s your name?” Hep said. The woman looked extremely offended.

“Samantha,” she said.

“Awesome, well, Samantha and Cindi, I don’t suppose you two could help us get this mess somewhat straightened up? Our friend who owns the boat is due back any minute.”

“You don’t own this boat?” Cindi asked Scroat. She sounded shocked.

“Uh, no. Did I say I owned it?”

“Well, that’s kind of the impression a girl gets when some guy says ‘hey, let’s take this party back to my boat.’ Isn’t that the impression you would get?”

“Yeah, I guess so. What the fuck were we drinking last night?”

“Well, I don’t know what you had before we showed up, but we lost count of how many Jaegerbombs you guys each had.”

“Oh.” That might explain the amnesia.

Hep looked at his watch. “Look, I hate to be a jerk, but we gotta get this cleaned up, like, now. Poseidon is going to be pissed when...”

A voice came from the companionway then, “When he gets back to his boat and discovered the two morons he trusted with it have turned it into some kind of squalid love nest in less than twenty four hours?”

“Yeah, that,” Hep said. “Uh, for what it’s worth, I was passed out on the sidewalk. I just found this.”

Poseidon’s jaw was working, and he had a twitch in his forehead.

“Dude, he looks a little stressed out,” Scroat mumbled to Hep.

“Do ya think?”

“I,” Poseidon said, “am going to go and have a bloody mary and pretend I did not come back to find a sink full of baked beans. When I get back to the boat, I expect it to be ship-shape and ready to set sail. Is that perfectly clear?”

“Yeah,” Hep said. “Um, except there’s this thing.”

“What,” Poseidon said, “thing?”

“Well, you might want to come up here and take a look.”

“What do I want to take a look at?”

“You’d better just come up here,” Hep said.

Scroat made discreet waving motions to Samantha and Cindi.

“I think you might want to get the fuck away from here,” he whispered.

Samantha and Cindi both gave Scroat a withering look, climbed out of the cabin, and soon they could hear two sets of high heels clicking away on the dock.

“Show me whatever it is, Hep,” Poseidon said. He grimaced as he walked through the cabin.

“It’s in here,” Hep said, and pointed into their stateroom. Poseidon walked in and saw the hole.

It was suddenly very, very quiet in the boat. The seagulls outside had stopped their racket. It seemed even the waves had stopped slapping the hull.

“There is a hole in my boat,” Poseidon said.

“Yeah, I don’t know how the fuck that...” Scroat began.

“There is a hole in my boat that was not here when I left the boat yesterday. You two are the only ones who have been on the boat since then.”

“Well, actually, Hep didn’t get here until this morning, and he found the hole,” Scroat said.

“There is a hole,” Poseidon said, “in my boat.”

“Sorry?” Scroat said.

Hep started to back away towards the companionway. “Psst,” he said to Scroat, and gave him a pointed look.

“Uh, look, Poseidon, I can see that you’re really upset. Look, I’ll go to the chandlery and find some fiberglass and epoxy and we’ll fix up your boat good as new. Hep is a damn fine craftsman, you know. It’ll probably be better than new, when he’s done with it,” Scroat said as he backed away as well.

Poseidon scratched his beard in a twitchy sort of way.

“Hep, you are family, and I know you wouldn’t deliberately punch a hole in my boat,” he said.

“Well, thanks,” Hep started to say.

“Which,” Poseidon said, interrupting Hep, ”is why I’m going to give you a running head start before I rip both of you limb from limb and use you as bait for my crab pots. I suggest you stay the hell out of my way from here on out. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly,” Hep said. “Uh, bye.”

“What, is he fucking joking?” Scroat asked Hep, half laughing.

“Run!” Hep said. He was already on deck, and turned to get off the boat.

“Thanks for the hospitality,” Scroat said, and gave a small wave. “Bye.”

He joined Hep on the dock and they hustled away.

“Where are we going?” Scroat asked.

“Away from water, I can tell you,” Hep said. “Just keep walking away from the ocean, we’ll figure something out along the way.”

At the top of the dock ramp, they bumped into Samantha and Cindi.

“Hey,” Hep said to them. “Look, I know you’re probably kind of sore at us and I don’t blame you, but, I don’t suppose you could give us a lift East? Like, now? We can buy gas.”

Samantha smirked, and said, “Sure, if you buy us breakfast too. Come on, my car’s over here.”