Ray Aldridge

Winedark

I WISH I were a cynic, too.

I'm sailing my tired old boat back to Mykonos by myself; the crew quit in Santorin. The cook was already gone. Fortunately, it's the end of the charter season.

The crew was a college boy from Indiana. A degree in animal husbandry, he told me. Took a year off to see the world, before he returns to get his degree in advanced cow-kicking.

Anyway, he said he couldn't take it anymore. I asked him what «it» was, exactly.

«You’re not lovable, Bradley,» he told me, with a look of unbecoming relish on his healthy young face. «You think you’re better than you are. Maybe you were worth a shit, a long time ago, before you drank yourself into the vegetable kingdom — though I never heard of those books you claim to have written. But now you're just a fat old drunk, playing Cap'n Bligh.» He shook his head. «The drunker you get, the meaner you get — you know that? And I've never seen you without a glass to hand, have I?»

I set my glass carefully on the cockpit table, but I didn't get up. I could see in his eyes that he wanted me to, and he was a big, strong cow-kicker.

«Just pay me off,» he said.

I laughed — with an effort, I'll admit. But then his hand twitched toward a winch handle that lay on the table, and I got scared. It's hard to be a principled coward, though a man should try.

So I paid him off, and in the twilight he went away down the jetty, without a backward glance. Beyond him the wall of the caldera rose up, in a thousand corroded colors. Up to the ghost-haunted heights of Thera. Where Byron probably st ill parties down every night, dancing in the Yellow Donkey with the tourists. In disguise.

I'm sorry. I can't help seeing things in this stupid, melodramatic way; I'm a trained observer. It's a cross to bear.

Anyway, I don't believe I’m such a tyrant. It's important to maintain discipline aboard a sailing vessel. One Captain under God, and all th at Boat's can't be democratic. Kids don’t understand; out on the sea, the cavalry won't come. It's up to you to save your own butt.

No, No. I think the boy found one of those smoky young Swedish girls, up the hill at the Atlantis Hotel. I can't say I blame him, if so. Those girls… they're as much a part of the islands as the ruined temples and the gullied hills; everywhere their bright heads shine in the Greek dazzle. Slim brown legs, taut northern breasts, good cheekbones, wide blue eyes. Astonishingly gullible — or maybe they just don't care if you lie to them, because they're going home next week. Hard to resist, when you're young and dumb.

Hell, I was a lot older and smarter than the cow-kicker when I ran out of charm and had to give them up.

So I'm sailing Olympias back by myself. She's a sweet old witch, though, and no trouble. Right now we're jogging along under staysail and mizzen, the main lowered and lashed down.

The night wind is booming over the starboard quarter, fine for going home. So I shouldn't complain. . but the wind worries me a little. The Piraeus weather broadcast said nothing about such a frisky breeze down here tonight. Well, they guess wrong, most of the time. Little squirrelly depressions swirl up out of nothing, and crash through the rocks and islets, completely unpredictable. Gone the next day, vanished into the white Aegean sunshine. Meterological pinball.

Sometimes these ghost winds can be evil; ask Odysseus.

Anyway, I'm somewhat concerned. Time for another ouzo, then. I fish the bottle out of the rack under the cockpit table and pour a half-tumbler out. If I sip frugally, and the boat's motion gets no worse, the drink will last me to midnight.

I love this table; it was one of my cleverest ideas. The cheap Greek wines are often drinkable, but shake them around a little, and they turn to vinegar overnight. The original table was gimballed, with a box full of lead for a counterweight. I took out the lead and built pigeonholes for a dozen bottles, and now my wine lasts long enough for me to drink it. That's what matters.

Achilles the wind vane steers us, doing a better job than I could, even if I were sober. I call the contraption Achilles because I replaced the vane's original white sail with a garishly tie-dyed pink-and-yellow fabric. I got it in Crete from an ancient beached hippie. Achilles was a bit of a transvestite. I always explain this little joke to the charterers, and they always smile tentatively and then laugh in that way people laugh when they're humoring a geek. Maybe I don't tell jokes very well; maybe humor isn't my forte. Sometimes I tell them how my ex-wife used to call me Achilles because, she said, I was a vulnerable heel. I want them to disagree, but they don't, usually.

Well, who cares? Not me. This wind. . it's picking up a little. Now I can occasionally hear the sibilant whisper of breaking crests. The darkness is too thick to see much, which is just as well, I suppose. If I could see the waves, I might be scared.

Olympias jolts, hit by an unexpected cross sea, and I spill my drink. I curse, unheard by anyone but the ghosts, and start to pour another one.

But then some remnant of caution stays me, and I settle for a glass of retsina. I've never really liked the paint-thinner taste of retsina, so that's what I drink whenever I don't want to get too drunk too fast. When I still had friends, they would laugh at the logic of this tactic, but what’s wrong with it?

Whatever works; that's my motto.

My friends, the better ones, sometimes talked to me about the drinking. They seemed to think there was such a thing as «quitting.» I don't understand that. Sure, I'm a drunk. I know it. But the glory of humanity is its adaptability. I've adapted to the passage of the poisonous molecules over my brain — it would kill me to stop, a s surely as it would kill me to reenter the ancestral sea and try to breathe water. I've made an irreversible adaptation. Maybe it's true that the stuff is slowly killing me, but I can't tell. Somewhere I have a little collection of articles clipped from American magazines. The articles are about folks with large pieces of their brains missing, excised after a bullet or a steering wheel or a cancer had violated their skulls.

And they've recovered; they're leading normal lives. No one knows unless they tell. I used to show these to my friends and laugh and fill another glass.

I haven't had occasion to display the clippings in some time, but I'm sure they're still aboard, somewhere.

Spray is beginning to wet the decks. I can taste the salt on my lips. The crests are starting to thunder, an ugly sound. I still think this is just a little crippled sirocco, blowing dust and ghosts up from North Africa.

I don't know why I'm always nattering on about ghosts. I don't believe in the poor, sad creatures at all… but I can't help thinking about them. This is such a haunted part of the world. So many generations have struggled to die here, but I don't think that's the cause. Not the antiquity alone, not just the unimaginable quantities of bones that layer the islands and the sea bottom. No, there've been so many atrocities, massacres, betrayals. So much agony— the sort of thing that breeds ghosts from the ordinarily serene release of death. Or so believers tell me.

For some reason, lurching through the noisy darkness, I remember a little story told me by a Greek caique captain, some years ago. I was waiting in Corfu for a party of young German charterers — the worst possible fate for a Med charter yacht, short of shipwreck or seizure, let me assure you — and struck up an acquaintance with Demetrios, who was a Cretan smuggler.