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Episode 56. Saltwater Rodeo
Sam was never satisfied. He wasn't satisfied being single. He wasn't satisfied being married. He knew he wouldn't be satisfied being divorced, so he just left his wife Delilah and his little boy Noah one day without warning.
He wasn't satisfied either not being a cowboy. He wanted to ride, rope and brand. But the sea was his arena. He had grown up on it and he hadn't managed to get away from it. So he did the only thing he could. He bought a cowboy hat.
Though from the East Coast, he knew from paying a lot of attention to everything western that no self-respecting cowboy went around in a new hat. The hat needed to show that you had been around and knew what you were doing. It should be mashed and frayed as if many ferocious rodeo bulls had tromped on it. Stains and cigarette burns as if from a certain allegiance to bars and wild living didn't hurt either. So he proceeded to process his hat. The first one acquired a certain genuineness but because it was straw soon fell apart as the saltwater took all the stiffening out. The second hat was felt but as it turned out this more expensive hat shrunk when wave-wetted and dried over and over. So Sam settled for leather. He knew it was eccentric, but then to be a cowboy on the ocean was eccentric. As he understood it, there was a certain innate eccentricity in being a cowboy anyway, a certain gathering of solitude around oneself as if it were a magic cloak. So he persuaded himself that a leather hat was allowable, and as his friends knew no better, he soon became known as the Saltwater Cowboy.
He was also a diver who made his living installing moorings. And it was his own launch they came in that morning to Pariah Cove, him and Random Jackson and Shorty Wheeler, to install a mooring for the German tycoon Dieter Klatten, for the yacht that would accommodate Klatten and his guests, a very large yacht that would require a very large mooring that would make the Saltwater Cowboy and his crew very rich for a day.
Sam had decided therefore that the entire day should constitute a celebration, beginning with beer for breakfast. It was ten miles down the coast from Terence Bay where Sam lived to Pariah Cove, and with his boat's antiquated single-cylinder engine carrying them at a sedate speed through the morning calm, it was possible to indulge in a good deal of the sort of breakfast they were having, and so they did.
The launch came putt-putting into Pariah at low tide and was made fast to the government wharf, where Klatten was waiting.
"And so, where is my mooring?" said Klatten, looking over the side of the wharf down the ladder at the three of them. "You are carrying it in that little boat? All I see is your silly hat and your beer cans. You are making a joke of me?"
Sam's mood at this point was not as expansive as it would be, but already it was unfolding like a magnificent rose. The impatience of an ignorant foreigner was no problem at all. Sam simply climbed up the ladder, clapped an arm around the shoulders of his smaller and shorter employer, assured him with an easy smile that all was in order, and went to get the pickup he had parked in the lot there the evening before.
"There's your mooring," he said, when he had the pickup backed down onto the wharf and could point to the four fifty-five gallon drums full of concrete each chained to the other in the back.
"Yes, but here it is," said Klatten, "not out there in the cove where my boat goes."
Sam took the tailgate off the pickup and instructed the German to let him know when he was close to the edge of the wharf, then put the truck in reverse and floorboarded the accelerator. A few feet from the edge, he chuckled as he slammed on the brakes to the sound of his employer screaming, "Now! Now! Now!" The drums slid cleanly out, over the side of the wharf, and sent up a towering splash that sprayed Random and Shorty in the launch and also his employer in the white linen suit that he wore.
While the German was still wiping his wire-rimmed glasses and before he could say anything, Sam drove back to the lot. "Now we wait," he said when he had walked back down.
"Wait for what?"
"Why, for the tide to rise, of course. You were going to wonder at me, very loudly perhaps, how we do the next thing. Which is get the drums out of the mud and over where you want your mooring. So I thought I'd save you the strain on your vocal cords. Come on down now and sit with us and have a drink and relax and you'll get to see more Nova Scotian technology."
Sensing an adventure, the German put aside his standoffishness and joined them in the launch. While the tide rose, he was entertained with jokes and liquor. At first the liquor was just beer. Then Random spotted a man waving on the opposite shore of the cove who as it turned out owed Shorty money that Shorty let him repay with a five-gallon jar of home-made rum. In the spirit of things, Shorty shared with his mates. While things grew more spirited, Sam slung a two-by-six from its resting place in the bilge up athwart the launch's gunwales amidships. With a boathook he reached down into the water and brought up a loop of chain from the linked drums that he then conveyed over the bow and across the two-by-six. The chain grew taut as the incoming tide increased the separation between the launch and the bottom. Finally the drums lifted, Sam started the engine, and the launch slowly, as if moving through syrup, towed its burden to the designated position where Random with a pair of boltcutters severed the heavy wire that had served as one link of the chain and the chain rattled away in a rush and the launch once again floated free. The German marvelled at Sam donning his wet suit, flippers, tanks and mask. "You are drinking so much, and you are going down there?"
"He's a cowboy," said Shorty, and he and Random both went off in a laughing fit that lasted long after Sam had gone over the side to reconnect the chain to the orange mooring ball they had brought for the purpose.
***
As the day progressed, the relative calm of the morning gave way to the prevailing and powerful southwesterly winds of the afternoon. In the sheltered cove, this had not mattered much. When it came time to go, though, and Sam invited their employer to accompany them on their ride home, the significance of the waves breaking high on the rocks outside caused enough of a dent in Klatten's intoxication that he expressed concern. "You want me to go with you out there? Out there where you should not even be, even if you were sober? No, you stay here. I have rooms in my house. My cook, he will make you all supper. You go home in the morning."
"Gents!" Sam exclaimed. "Mr. Deeder is right. I advise you to stay here and enjoy a rich man's room and board. As for me, I got to tell you, this here rodeo's just gettin' started. I wouldn't miss it for the world. What hombre would who's worth his salt? But you go on. You all go on. Be safe."
Shorty and Random never batted an eye. In fact, raising their plastic cups, they cried out, "Yee Ha!"
"Well," Random said to Klatten, "don't you worry. We'll tell you all about it later."
After a momentary inner debate between his sense of what was reasonable and his sense of what was called for, Klatten replied, after raising his own plastic cup, "Well, so much the hell with it. Off we go."
***
Sam knew what was expected of a star. He gave the helm to Random and went forward. As they jarred into the first of the wind-driven waves on the outside, he was seen holding the painter at the bow of the launch as if it were the single rein of a bucking bronc, while with his other hand he fanned the wind with his leather hat and shouted. The launch plunged and lifted and plunged again. He flexed his knees and took the jolting and held on. The spray battered him. He spat it out.
"Judges!" he shouted. "What say you? Can I ride or what?"
***
There was a bootlegger there in Terence Bay and Random knew that was where they were headed and that the launch would make it there and so he never worried till the moment, in a narrow inlet, in water calm as calm could be, that the bow ground on the sand and Sam, who for ten miles in a maelstrom had performed like a champion, executed a complete flip backwards and landed awkwardly with a snapping sound.
"Jeez, Sammy," said Random, shutting off the engine, "What'd you want to go and do that for? We was perfect."
***
The hangout of Bootlegger Bob was a favourite with Sam and his mates. It was right on the shore and had pool tables and cheap booze and girls that wanted what you wanted, as long as you were generous. Random and Shorty were sure looking forward to it, since the day's work had given them plenty of generosity's wherewithal. And Klatten found that he was not averse to making up excuses for his wife. She valued honesty above all and he loved that. It made fooling her expensive, far more expensive than it would a local girl, and he was a fool for the power of big spending. He remembered a necklace she wanted. He looked around with a lecherous eye.
Only Sam was without interest and sulked in a corner. Certainly something was broken in his hand, but beyond that, as if his hand was nothing but a switch, he found that altogether he had been turned off. He cramped their style with his refusals. He didn't want another drink or to play pool or to indulge with any woman there.
He said, "If I was half a man, really, I would never have left her. Or Noah. I'm a daddy, goldern it. A daddy!"
Random borrowed his leather cowboy hat. Shorty borrowed the hat from Random. Sugar Plum, or so she called herself
Category:Scenic
Subcategory:Oceans
Subcategory Detail:
Keywords:and, atlantic, black, breaker, colossal, harbor, harbour, high, island, north, nova, prospect, protection, sauls, scotia, spray, strong, wave, white, wind-driven