Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,20

fail. He sold the Ericson thirty-nine and bought a thirty-six-foot cruising sloop a couple could handle, and we planned to sail it to Honolulu, just the two of us.

“Then Lew Bonner asked us if we’d take Jeri, Lew was working for Steve then, running a lumberyard and building supply here in Coleville, and we both knew Jeri, of course, and liked her. She was a real sweet kid, but becoming something of a hippie, and it bothered Lew a little. Most jocks are as square as Smokey the Bear, anyway—oops. The good old Carmody tact, but then I don’t think of you as a jock, somehow.”

Romstead shrugged. “Neither did the National League.”

“Their parents were dead, and Lew had looked after her since she was sixteen. She’d been going to school at San Diego State but dropped out and was hanging out with a bunch of kids in Del Mar. She liked sailing and thought the trip would be groovy, or whatever the word was in 1967, so she came along.

“Everything went along fine until about a thousand miles out of Honolulu when we ran into a real bitch of a dustup. I don’t think it ever reached gale force, actually, but it kept freshening while we were running before it, and before we knew it, we were carrying too much sail and had already carried it too damned long. We broached to, got knocked down, lost the mast and sails overboard, and shipped enough water to soak everything below. But the worst of it was Steve. He was badly hurt. He’d got thrown across the deck and landed on something that caught him just below the rib cage. He was in awful pain and could hardly move. The radio was drowned, so we couldn’t call for help, and Jeri and I alone couldn’t cope with that mess over the side. We made Steve as comfortable as we could with the pain-killers from the medicine chest, but we were absolutely helpless.

“We were near the Los Angeles-Honolulu steamer lane, and late that afternoon we sighted a ship on the horizon and fired off some distress flares, but either it didn’t see us or didn’t give a damn, because it went on. And just about sunset, Steve died. I still wake up with a cold sweat, dreaming about that night. Jeri and I didn’t think we’d ever see dawn again, and before the night was over, we were so beaten we didn’t really care a great deal whether we did or not. But when daylight did come there was another ship in sight, way off on the horizon. All we could do was fire off the last of our flares and pray. Then we saw it had changed course and was coming. It was the Fairisle.

“Your father sent over a boat and took us off. An autopsy was performed on Steve when we reached Honolulu, and the doctors said he’d died of internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen. I’d had it with oceans for all time, or thought I had. After I got back home and began to recover a little, I wrote the usual letters thanking him and the boat crew and also to the line praising him for his seamanship and for the royal way we’d been treated after we were picked up.

“That would have been the end of it, normally, except that about a year later I was in San Francisco on a shopping jag and walked out of the City of Paris one afternoon and bumped right into him. He invited me to have a drink. I don’t know what he did three days later, when the tugs pulled the Fairisle away from the pier and she started down the bay, but I went back to the Mark and collapsed; I think I slept the clock around twice. Your father was one hell of a charming and fascinating man, and he had a way with women, as perhaps you’ve heard.

“When he came back from that trip, I was waiting for him in San Francisco, flew to Los Angeles to see him there, and then flew to Honolulu. The following trip I sailed with him, to Hong Kong, Kobe, and Manila—the Fairisle has accommodations for twelve passengers, you know. In the next three years I made three more trips to the Orient with him, and when he retired, I was partly responsible for his settling here. He wouldn’t even consider La Jolla.

“There was never any question of marriage. I was