Chapter 7: It’s Noon Somewhere

 

 

Robin takes the soundtrack of her life seriously. She asks me to take the wheel while she flicks on the stereo. Sheryl Crow sings about liking a good beer buzz early in the morning.

I like it, too. Or used to, anyway. I wonder how long I’ll continue this experiment with total clarity now that court-ordered sanctions are not particularly applicable. My spurned lover, Alcohol, is calling me: “Come back Hailey, all is forgiven.”

Robin is an instigator.

“Grab me another cold one. And get one for yourself, if you like beer. ‘It’s Five O’clock Somewhere.’ ”

“Yeah, I do. I even have one of those t-shirts with the Benjamin Franklin quote about beer being God’s way of showing us that He wants us to be happy. But I got a DUI right before we left on our boat trip. I’ve been on the wagon ever since.”

Robin eyes me with suspicion for the first time. “Well, I’d like another one, if you don’t mind.”

Blackout’s stainless steel galley appliances include an additional built-in refrigerated cooler devoted to beer. There must be five cases of Miller Lite cans in it. Miller Lite is my brand of choice. Just my luck Robin isn’t one of those penny-pinching cruisers who drinks whatever swill is on sale. It would be easy to turn down Old Milwaukee, Busch Light, Schlitz or Florida’s favorite cheap beer, Natural Ice, aka “Natty Ice.”

“Have you noticed how Pabst Blue Ribbon is making a comeback?” I call to Robin. “And whatever happened to regular Coors?”

I bring up to the pilothouse a comfortably familiar can, nestled in a foam koozie advertising a Detroit-area bar. She raises her eyebrows, questioning before she pops the top, “This gonna bother you?”

“No. I may have one later. But I’ll wait for right now. I’m trained not to drink underway.”

Technically I am still on probation. No alcohol, no drugs not prescribed by a physician, random urine testing by any probation officer, cop or authority figure who feels like springing it on me. The fear of being jailed again is somewhat irrational, but it’s unquestionably, regularly there, a deep dread that hammerlocks the muscles at the base of my skull. I wonder if my total identification with Joey’s trips to jail was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps I destined myself to spend at least one night as an inmate in the county pokey.

In my county jail mugshot I am smiling, pleading, placating, as if a big mistake not mine has been made and will be rectified in short order. It’s pathetic. Only the tight ligaments cording my neck above my collar bone convey tension. My pupils are dilated after being brought out from a dark cell in the women’s section into the harsh, unforgiving lights of the booking area. Escaping tendrils poke willy-nilly from my waitress braids threaded with gray. I am a diminutive, freaked-out Pippi Longstocking, thoroughly cowed by the lying sack of crap small-town cop who decided to make my arrest as unpleasant as possible. There’s a county jail website on the internet. The booking photos remain online, organized by date. Derek set my mug as the desktop wallpaper on our home computer. Funny, right?

In my little town up North, any number of police officers that I know on at least a nodding basis could have apprehended me on that fateful night. The luck of the draw served up a bandy-legged mite with myopic eyes behind Coke-bottle glasses, with giant ears and a Napoleon complex to match. “By the Book Ricky,” they call him, or “Ricky the Dick.” We have a history. He’s the same cop who has dogged my son from time to time purely for shits and giggles. A month before Derek and I left on Chinook he came nosing for Joey at the house, sniffing at the front door like an overly eager bomb dog. Derek ordered him off the property simply by noting that it is out of his jurisdiction.

By the Book Ricky came back to the cell a couple of hours after my official photo session in the front room. He wanted to take extra pictures with his own camera. He’s probably beating off to the images of me cowering and trying to block my face right now or has my mugshot head superimposed atop some hapless big-boobed bimbo on an amateur porn site.

After Ricky’s photo session a fresh round of drunks entered the jail. All male. All in various states of escalating emotion. A happy young lad laughed, burped and laughed again as he was booked in just around the corner from my cell. In the drunk tank, alumni from hockey teams and high schools fell on each other like long-lost bosom buddies. I was reminded of how one Saturday night Joey and his then-girlfriend Kirsten ended up spending an evening in mutual incarceration. He was serving a fleeing and eluding sentence. She’d just earned her first DUI after a string of MIPs (Minor In Possession). One in three American kids is arrested by the time they are 23. I was relieved that Joey wasn’t keeping me company on that particular Saturday night.

I tell Robin all this with humility, tongue loosened and embarrassment diverted by the active routine of a traveling day on the river. Watching the water and minding the charts instead of each other’s faces makes it easier to get the words out. It’s as if not knowing each other has cleared the way for intimate revelation.

Robin feels it too. She tells me about the lupus.

I don’t know anything about it and since she hates the internet, bad news, research, follow-up visits and second opinions, she doesn’t know much more than I do.

“My joints are inflamed. I tire easily. And I’m not supposed to stay out in the sun,” she says. “Lupus isn’t fatal, but there’s no cure for it.”

“What do you take for it? If you don’t mind me asking.” I’m not sure what’s what but there are four or five prescription bottles in Blackout’s medicine cabinet, along with pain patches and a veritable drug-store shelf of over-the-counter pain relievers.

“Let’s see …” she ticks the inventory off on her fingers. “If the Aleve and Motrin don’t do the trick I’ve got prescription NSAIDS, anti-inflammatories, that are stronger. Then there are the anti-malarial pills that upset my stomach so I don’t take as many as I’m supposed to. And then we have the immune suppressant, which gives me nausea, diarrhea and sometimes a fever. It’s also extremely expensive. There’s supposed to be a new brand coming out called Benlysta that they want me to try once it goes through trials.

“And then the steroids, corticosteroids, I guess they’re called. Not like body builders take. There are so many long-term side effects that I can’t remember them all. The worst are the bruising and the mood swings, although the occasional euphoria rocks. But the weight gain sucks. You just get fat in select areas, like your abdomen and the back of your neck and your face. But the nausea and diarrhea help with that.”

“Sounds awful,” I say.

“I hate the fucking steroids. My cheeks get fat like a chipmunk’s and I turn into a raving bitch. I only take steroids if I feel a flare coming on or if I have to after a flare,” she explains, “and I have the pain patches to put on my calves and the arches of my feet so I can last longer walking.”

“How often do you have flare-ups?” I ask.

“Not that often, but when they come, oh boy. And I’ve had seizures a few times. My last flare was last winter. I couldn’t walk for five days. The doctors just keep referring me to rheumatologists and neurologists and all they ever do is prescribe drugs I don’t want to take that cost a lot of money. And they never tell me what’s causing the problem.”

Feeling mutually devil-may-care, Robin and I decide to wave at every boat that passes by and every living thing we see ashore. We bark at dogs. We imitate the herons; there are more of them than I have ever seen on any given day anywhere, great gray bearded creatures majestically surveying the water with Zenlike concentration. Road and railway bridges arch over the trail ahead of us. To port and starboard functioning factories spew white, gray or brown smoke. The dead factories sprouting rust, vines curling around the smashed eyes of panoramic windows are beautiful in a stark way, yards littered with skeletal iron, rotted coils of rope thick as a brawny man’s arm moldering on abandoned piers awaiting barges that no longer stop at decayed piers. Corrugated outtake pipes gush foamy brown water. Terraced levees cascade man-made waterfalls into the river.

Our second lock of the day, aptly named “Lockport,” is a much larger drop, approximately 40 feet. The friendly tenders beckon Blackout into the well, handing down two lines, fore and aft. Right before the gates close the motley cabin cruiser and the four Bozos who smashed into us zoom in. Sirens go off as the gates close and I join Robin in the disco whoop.

“No ropes. We’ll just float,” yells the cabin cruiser skipper, driving too fast up to the head of the lock past Blackout and a couple of other large motor yachts and a sailboat that have been waiting on us. The happy-go-lucky cabin cruiser crew runs up the center of the chamber, now grooving to Pearl Jam, inciting a small panic. The middle-aged vigilant crews conscientiously grip their boathooks, gloved hands clutching the lines.

Looking back at the stern from my position up front, I barely have time to register that Robin is nowhere to be seen but has firmly lashed the lockline to a back cleat. As we drop, the ropes must be paid out or the tied line on the cleat will hang the boat up by the ass end as the water recedes beneath it. The lock machinery hums; as the tension on the line increases the boat cleat actually groans.

“Robin? Hey?”

She emerges from inside the boat where she was doing God knows what, maybe using the head. “Grab a knife, you gotta cut that back line,” I holler. “Cut it now. Hurry!”

The rope fibers twang like guitar strings as Robin frantically saws through the thick, straining rope. The jerks in the cabin cruiser hee-haw maniacally; this is a far better show than their own.

Breathing deep, I stifle the strong urge to vault back to help her. It is slightly reassuring that she had a knife handy. Despite my distaste for sharp objects, it’s essential to have cutting tools available everywhere on a boat. Robin is completely calm. “I’m so sorry, guys, please throw me another line-a line, yeah!” she shouts between cupped hands up to the lip of the lockwall. We’ve dropped about 20 feet down in the chamber; the tenders on the sidewalk are no longer visible. A grinning face peers down, and in short order a replacement rope drops over the slimy wall. Blackout’s stern has drifted too far away for Robin to reach it. “Try the boathook,” I yell, but Blackout’s derriere is swinging out into the center of the lock. She clips the middle of the free-floating cabin cruiser with a satisfying “Donk.” Two boozy Bozos land in the water. There is applause.

Now that Blackout is not going to come crashing down on them, the boats across, behind and in front of us on the walls are more entertained than alarmed, clapping and laughing as the flailing young men paddle about ineffectively.

“Hey, it says no swimming in the locks, can’t you read?” catcalls the sailor two boats behind us as the chastened cabin cruiser crew fishes out the soggy dudes.

Robin apologizes to the lock tender again. “I am so sorry. Let me buy you some new line,” she shouts up, genuflecting as if speaking to Oz the Great and Terrible.

Again a friendly face appears over the lip of the sidewalk. “It’s OK. Ain’t the first time this happened. We got more lines. You travel safe now, OK?”

I’m trembling. “What were you doing?”

“Had to pee,” she says.

“I am so sick of collisions,” I mutter.

“Relax. Happens again, I’ll just whiz in the scupper drain.”

The bell rings. The gate opens. I shove off the wall. Flip the bow bumper back on deck. Stare straight ahead. Let her disco whoop alone. “What crawled up your butt and died?”

“Nothing. Replaying my fall from grace.” I coil the bowline, and peel off my gloves and life jacket.

“So did you wreck the car? Kill somebody?”

“She accused me of trying to kill her. Said I ran into her SUV so hard it knocked her flip-flop off. I bumped the ass-end of her Truckasaurus, which, I might add, was illegally parked. And she was drunk, too.”

“Did she get in trouble?” The river is uniformly deep here. No need to mind the markers. And traffic has eased up.

“This runty cop-everybody in town calls him Ricky the Dick-believed her. She’s young and pretty. And she called in the accident.” Whoever has the smartest phone wins. I’m not allowed to have my own phone. Derek’s rule. And at my age I’ve forgotten how to have histrionics while maintaining a beguiling cuteness.

“He breathalyzed us both. Made us do the ABCs backward. Walk the line. Then he told Drama Queen she had to wait 45 minutes to drive. I got the handcuffs, and a ride to jail.”

“I’ve always wondered what it’s like,” Robin says, sliding Blackout to port to let another asphalt dredge glide by.

“They call the county jail ‘no-tell hotel.’ It’s not as scary as prison.” They took my Citizen Ecowatch, diamond studs, vintage rhinestone bracelet and engagement ring. My wedding band could not be tugged off. My white-and-purple mottled knuckles were too swollen. I stopped shivering when they put me in the heated cop cruiser, another black SUV, but was still cold to the core when we got to the jail. Nevertheless I was not allowed to keep the two sweatshirts I had earlier pulled from my boat rucksack in the back of the car as the chill of the night dew bit my bones at the “crime scene.”

“Did they take your belt and shoelaces?”

“Yeah. They let me keep my red bra, which I could have handily hung myself with — four years old with quite a bit of give.”

But physical suicide is not my scene. On that night I protested nothing, did not cry, complied cheerfully and died inside.

“I used to think I’d made a model prisoner. I love to read. No one would be yelling ‘get your nose out of that book!’ ”

Robin lit another cigarette.

“I didn’t think about jail a lot, until Joey started building a rap sheet.” Being a Rules Girl, I avoided trouble like the plague. But occasionally, after a prison-themed movie of the week or a magazine article on the subject, I thought about what it would be like to be locked away. There I’d be, stoic, a little heroic even, sinking into important literary works, and dwelling in interior intellect — a world of ideas from which I would dreamily rise from time to time for a daily workout and occasional shower. Sure, I’d miss filet mignon, fresh cantaloupe, and Key West pink shrimp. But I don’t get to eat all those things every day anyway, and having eaten them on occasion I would have the memory of how they tasted.

From my son, I learned that jail involves long, boring periods of tedium in which modern-day inmates watch re-runs of The Simpsons, That ’70s Show, and Family Guy all afternoon on the communal TV set positioned outside the cells so all the prisoners have a decent view of the screen. When he was in jail I brought in some board games to “donate,” seeing as inmates aren’t allowed personal possessions or gifts other than socks, undies, t-shirts and in cool weather possibly a sweatshirt depending on the mood of the supervising guards. Anything else brought in must be a general gift to the facility.

“They played Clue and Monopoly for a week or so,” I told Robin. “Then the fighting started over whodunit and how many hotels on Boardwalk. The guards took the games away.”

Shut in my cell, I immediately understood that it would take quite some time to settle into any sort of personal routine let alone cope with group dynamics. Contentedly reading away a jail sentence was a bunch of idealistic claptrap. In jail, you don’t feel like yourself. You feel like nothing. What my mom calls “the black mood” is all-enveloping. The dullness of not feeling trades places with the shifting shapes of self-defeating suicidal thought processes: righteous and impotent anger, the aforementioned self-loathing, numbness approaching catatonia, all states of mind that do not foster peace, forgiveness or anything approaching happiness.

Having been widely seminared in the corporate world, I knew I should be mentally formulating a proactive action plan with strategic goals. If, for example, I truly did have to stay over the weekend, I would ask how one went about purchasing pen and paper. I would stop beating myself up. I would find an aggressive attorney to challenge the blood-alcohol test, the results which at this point were unknown to me. And I would never, ever, never drive drunk again. In fact, I would never drink again.

“My lawyer had a needlepoint pillow in his office embroidered with the cryptic motto: ‘Lawyers: Don’t drive drunk without one.’ ”

Robin laughs. “Did he get you out?”

Even if I’d had a cell phone on the night I fell from grace, it would have done me no good.

“No. He’s dead. He hung himself from the township water tower six days prior. Joey and I found him.”

In my cell I remember wishing that I was truly drunk, blotto, blitzed, smashed, because I could not will away the image of Mark’s lolling head, pasty face, livid purple ligature marks visible under the rope around his neck. He was a tall man; his toes brushed the ground, one leather sandal on, one off. He had one hand in the pocket of his plaid preppy shorts, heavy gold wristwatch marking time.

The body looked like a stuffed dummy. Mark was a heavy man and his dead weight did not sway as it hung limply from the long rope dangling from the very top of the water tower down to just inside the right of the aluminum fencing encasing the tower base. From four feet away he still looked fake, a macabre joke fashioned for amusement by the out-of-town crew hired to paint the tower. Joey had gone out earlier to ride his motorcycle; I was on my morning walk when I saw he’d stopped on the trail next to the tower. “Mom?”

“What’s this?” I said, coming closer, motioning for Joey to stay back.

“Is it real?”

“Yes, honey. Just stay back now.” I could see the dark hair on the arms ruffling in the warm breeze. Birds cawed, chittered and cheeped in the bordering cedar and pine thicket. He didn’t smell and he wasn’t rigid. His head canted left over the efficiently tied noose that made terrible use of the thick ropes the tower painters had rigged. A tall white plastic industrial bucket was tipped at his feet; a folding chair had collapsed. He had climbed onto the bucket, which had been placed on the chair.

“Looks like he literally kicked the bucket,” remarked Joey, his back to the scene, pulling out his cell phone — Derek couldn’t stop him from having one.

The corpse was wearing sunglasses, a mercy. I don’t remember what color his polo shirt was. His hair was black, thick and full, peppered with silvery-gray. His chest did not rise and fall.

I heard car doors slam. “Uh, you might want to not come any closer,” I heard Joey tell the arriving onlookers. “There’s a dead guy. I already called 911.”

Even in such an undignified position, the corpse maintained a certain arrogance: a fine, upstanding man-about-town in his 50s, dressed down for the weekend, perhaps for a round of golf with drinks at the 19^th Hole to follow. Mark’s car was parked nearby, a new-model Jeep Wagoneer with a kayak-carrier on top. Later I saw a middle-aged woman and a younger woman — his wife and daughter-removing a laptop and some other items from the vehicle. I didn’t know them well. I knew him from one brief visit to his office to talk about Joey — on his advice we’d gone with another lawyer who specialized in youthful offenders — and from a score of visits he’d made to the Elbow Room while I was working there. He was disdainful of our liquor selection, but liked to do his drinking out of town, especially after we made a point of stocking Glendfiddich especially for him.

How long had Mark been hanging? Why did he want to die? Why did he choose to die there? Did the long swaying ropes call to him as he drove past the water tower? Was he fatally ill? In deep financial trouble? Was there no other way out?

A pick-up truck with two porky little kids and their chubby parents pulled off the road, joining the other car that had stopped. In a small town, death scenes have a way of gathering steam. As the children toddled forward, one of the boys clutching a red plastic fire truck, I shooed them back. “If you could please stand back, show a little respect, please,” I asked the parents, still herding the kids away from the corpse dangling there like a life-size swollen Cabbage Patch doll.

Later, after the cops had taken our names and excused us from the scene, I cursed my Information Specialist instinct for details that could not be purged from my relentlessly fact-gathering brain. Pacing in the living room alone later that afternoon, I nearly jumped out of my skin when a bird hit the window. A particular type of berry on the front-yard bushes makes them crazy in the harvest season. The collisions, two or three a week when the red and orange berries are ripe, are often fatal, although some lie there on the front porch, dazed, slowly coming back like a contender in the ring woozy after a knockout, collecting themselves and flying away. Don’t the waxwings and woodpeckers, the chickadees and sparrows know that all is not as it seems?

The resonance of the bang, the puff of feathers glued to the picture window, the wisps of dander oscillating in sunlight motes indicated — before I even looked at the porch floor beneath — that this bird, an already stiffening flicker, would not take wing again. I forced myself to grab the shovel immediately, scooping up the lifeless light corpse, tossing it into the cedar thicket across the street.

“A few hours later, my mom calls from Florida. Dad’s lung cancer is now Stage IV. ‘We are all terminal,’” she says.

“I didn’t realize how much this shit affected me,” I tell Robin. “I couldn’t cry. I didn’t sleep. Food repulsed me. My dead lawyer, the dead bird, my dying father — all of a sudden it’d hit me, I’d shake it off with a happy face for the restaurant shift, then I’d come home and have a few beers — no, a lot of beers. And when the beers quit working, I switched to vodka. And when coming home made me sad, I did my drinking in other places.”

I’d stumble onto the boat at the marina at four in the morning or fall onto the couch at home, praying that I could focus on the words in a book and read myself into oblivious slumber. “Of course we all know that the more you tell yourself to go to sleep the more elusive it gets, right?”

“Especially with all this menopause crap on top of it,” nods Robin.

“I acted my way through the day, perky, cheerful Hailey, going that extra smile. And I drank, and I drove.”

Frantic to celebrate something, anything, I went to the liveliest local bar in town one Friday night for a co-worker’s going-away party even though I was exhausted. All the other staff had clocked out and gone ahead of me. I had a late table; the bartender, head chef and I were the only ones left in the place when we finally locked the doors. “I’d already had two beers at the restaurant,” I explained to Robin (who has at least four before lunch every day), “and then I had another at the bar.”

Of course I felt OK to drive when I left the bar. Of course I was totally delusional.

“Well it doesn’t sound to me like you could have been legally drunk,” says Robin.

“If I was, I sobered up quick in that cell.” Shivering, hollow, I waited for daylight. There were steel bars all around me. Even the dim bulb in the hall had a cage around it. Finally I smelled coffee brewing as thin morning light cued up on the yellow brick towers on the portion of the gothic courthouse next door visible from my thin, slatted window. A tray slid into place on the metal depression built into the cell door. I regarded the paper-towel-wrapped toast, milk carton and fun-size box of Froot Loops with contempt. But I was too cold to ignore the Styrofoam cup of hot coffee.

Wrapped in my ugly jail serape I sipped, face to the courthouse towers watching what I could see of the sunrise. Soon after I gave up the struggle with my bursting bladder and peed for the camera into the metal toilet bowl, sacrificing privacy and personal dignity. The guards watched me urinate. If this was happening in the outside world it would be against the law. In here it is the law.

“I remember thinking that I am nothing. I hated myself. I wished I was dead.”

Robin shakes her head. Sips her beer.

Derek bailed me out at 9 a.m. and was already gone by the time the deputy opened the cell door. I walked home. Before a hot shower I stepped on the scale. My weight had plummeted to 95 pounds.

“That’s why you registered on the alcohol Richter scale,” says Robin. “And that’s why I got a top-of-the-line bike with a rack large enough for a 12-pack 15 years ago.”

“What really gets me is why I went out that night at all. I have not seen Krystal since. Clearly she wasn’t a friend, just a work buddy.”

Clearly I was on the prowl for Lover Number Four. He was the most dangerous of all. You just never knew where you’d run into him; there were four or five places he liked to go and I seldom had time to look for him after work and between family obligations.

“Krystal was just a lame excuse to look for nookie from my latest paramour.”

“You really enjoy beating yourself up,” Robin shakes her head.

Blackout comes alongside the Joliet town dock after dark, Robin slowing to idle, the boat hovering just off the edge of the crumbling facewall to wait for a three-by-three tow barge to thrum by, search beacons sweeping the channel like a gulag escape scene in an old war movie, white backwash boiling behind it. Two other power yachts in the 50-foot range and the same sailboat we saw in the locks lurch into the aggregate pier, bumping as the wake rolls under us, rubber fenders squirting up. The sailboat’s metal rigging clangs in protest.

The obnoxious wake rolls everything from the oranges on the countertop to my stomach contents. All items on Blackout’s deck are securely lashed; we haven’t done such a thorough job of stowing items below. Magazines slide off the salon couch. Shoes tumble across the cabin, accompanied by the rattle of saucepans in the drainer and the disturbing clink of bottles and glassware which most boaters are not foolish enough to keep aboard. I make a mental note to put clean socks over any bottles and layer towels between glassware. Prevents breakage and the repetitive clinking that drives me up a wall.

When our nerves and the boat have settled, Robin nudges Blackout closer using its bow thrusters, a stabilizing force foreign to most rag-baggers, as sailors are sometimes called. I step from deck to pier taking care with my footing as tiny rocks break loose and plunk into the water in mini-landslides. As I secure bowlines Robin takes up the all-important mid-ship springline and adjusts the stern tie-up. There are a limited amount of cleats and giant metal bollards here and as is so often the case on the rivers, tying up requires some creativity. “Stay there; we’re going to loop the lines back onto the boat, OK?” I hiss in a stage whisper to Robin, so as to not disturb the neighbors who are apparently retired for the evening or trying to get back to sleep after the tow wake.

“Hey little lady, how you doin’?” The panhandler is in my face before I realize he’s crept up on me. “That sure is a nice boat, how much you pay for somethin’ like that?”

The panhandler is cocky, aggressive and standing way too close. I just want to get Blackout tied up and duck back below as fast as possible.

“This old thing? It’s a 1977. About $200,” I say to indicate we don’t have any money to spare. Everyone always thinks boaters are loaded. “It leaks so we have to keep bailing it out.”

“Huh huh,” he laughs uncertainly and stupidly, hands stuffed in a quilted plaid jacket, steam puffing out his nostrils in the cold night. “If you could just spare a couple bucks, my girl left me …”

“Hey Hailey, I’m shutting down the computer,” Robin yells from the pilothouse, ruining my floating-paupers ruse. “Bring the other GPS in from the deck locker.”

The panhandler smiles, refraining from rubbing his hands together.

Then his cell phone rings and I smile.

“Nice phone, buddy. Go peddle your bullshit somewhere else, OK? Call whoever pays your cell phone bill for help.”

“I didn’t come over here to talk to you,” he says, straightening his shoulders and puffing up his chubby chest. The words “Uppity White Bitch” are not spoken, but the implication is clear. “I came here to talk to your husband.”

If I was a dog, the ruff on my neck would be quivering. I can’t afford to make a scene and attract attention. The last thing I need is for a crazy homeless beggar to squawk until the cops come poking around. “My husband doesn’t talk to beggars.” That came out way snottier than I intended.

“I am not a beggar!” He stepped closer to the rear of the boat, yelling through the back door “Heyyyy — Hello in there, sir?”

Robin thundered out, twiggy but authoritative, scrunching her forehead as if she isn’t welcoming the interruption from the engine room or navigation station. Her deep voice and androgynous upper-class fishing attire completely convince the panhandler that he’s appealing to the sane male aboard.

I’m worried that if stray dogs and lost causes are her forte, I may be looking at our newest crew member “He just wants money, honey.” Keep a straight face, Hailey. “I already told him that we don’t have any to spare. He said he was broke. And then his cell phone rang.”

“Wait a minute,” he insists. “She called me a beggar. That is not how you treat people.”

“Well, weren’t you asking for money?” I’ve got a hand on a cocked-out hip, body language hostile. “Wouldn’t that be begging? So by definition, you would be a beggar.”

He ignores me. “Listen here, sir, I have just recently been stranded; my personal property was stolen and when I tried to recover it they put me off the boat. My mama’s sick over in Memphis. My girlfriend won’t come get me. She’s mad. I’m just trying to scrape up the cash for a one-way bus ticket.”

His cell phone rings again. “Excuse me ma’am, sir, I got to take this.”

Robin laughs as she produces a $20 from the right-hip pocket of her cargo shorts. (Robin won’t wear pants without pockets. Later I will find out that she prefers boxers to briefs. Her favorite pair features Snoopy.)

“That was a GOOD story. I’m paying him for that story,” she says to me in a no-arguments tone of voice I will come to know well.

The beggar, his back to us a few steps away, mutters in low, urgent tones, talking into the receiver. He looks up in annoyance when she whistles, but revives a civil attitude and a rapid approach when she proffers the cash.

“Here you go sir, good luck to you,” she snaps out, making her voice deeper than it usually is.

“Bless you sir, thank you,” the beggar nods, shooting me a vindicated smirk. “Do you take this boat all the way to the Gulf of Mexico?”

“Great. He wants to chat,” I mutter under my breath.

A statuesque woman steps into the pool of the overhead dock lights. Her 5’10” silhouette is all curves, sturdy power thighs, admirable breasts (which we will later learn are 34Ds thoughtfully augmented by one of the better plastic surgeons serving the Las Vegas modeling, dancing and hooking community).

“I think you got what you came for, Mister, so why don’t you make like a tree and leaf?” Her voice is Midwest with a tiny hint of southern twang. The night lights catch-and-glow at the tips of the tendrils escaping from a pony tail. Her eyes catch the ambient light, too, gleaming wide, full of intention and spirit.

It appears Joliet Veterans Park has a blonde Amazon holding the fort.

“Go on now, buh-bye,” she shoos the beggar away with gestures that display exceptionally well-groomed hands tipped by a French manicure. I admire her tone of sweet menace. Very disarming. The beggar retreats.

“Thanks,” I say, offering a hand, which she can’t grip because hers are full. “I’m Hailey and this is Captain Robin.”

“Trish,” she says and drops the Hello Kitty duffle bag and Louis Vuitton satchel. Behind her we spot a hard blue train case and a big green canvas rucksack. Uh-oh.

“What’s up with the luggage?” asks Robin.

“I am leaving the man on that big yacht up yonder,” says Trish.

There are two. “Which one?” I ask.

“The big sky-blue yacht with the navy-blue awnings,” she clarifies. “I’ve been traveling with that guy since Vegas, but we just came from Chicago. I haven’t even really known him long enough to call it leaving.”

“Hailey’s running away, too,” announces Robin.

Trish smiles at me, but I cringe. Robin can’t even keep a secret for 24 hours. To change the subject away from me, I ask, “You’re from Las Vegas?”

“Who’s from Vegas?” she says, rolling her eyes. “I grew up in Grand Rapids. Michigan.”

At this Robin snorts. “No shit. We’re from Michigan too!”

The snort is contagious. And as it often does, laughter clears the air. “Come on aboard and have a beer,” Robin invites.

“Where do I get on?” It’s clear that she hasn’t been around boats for very long.

As I step toward the gangway door she follows along on the sidewalk in tottering Five-inch spiked boots. “Take your boots off, sit down on the side of the pier and I’ll help you over,” I instruct. “Those are definitely not boat shoes. And this wall is super crumbly.”

“Hand over your stuff first,” says Robin. “It’ll get ripped off out here.” Trish hands over the garish zippered kitty carry-all, the Samsonite train case, the Louis Vuitton satchel and the green rucksack that weighs at least 40 pounds.

Once the baggage is toted down the side deck and deposited on the back deck, there’s very little room to move, so we migrate into the living room, which is what I persist in calling the salon.

“Sit,” says Robin, and we do, after I grab a beer for Trish-and one for myself. “So do you need a ride?” Robin asks, taking a swallow of the Lite she’s already working on.

“Jesus, Rob!” I say. “Way to cut through the niceties.”

Trish looks at me long and hard.

“I did not run away. I just went. What’s your story?”

“We can call you a cab, or figure out the bus schedules or whatever you’d like to do,” I rush to offer options. Anything to get her off my least favorite subject. Me.

Give her this, she can take a hint. “Well where are you two going? I might be headed in the same direction, that being anywhere but here. That Harry is a piece of work. We left Chicago a week ago and have been here ever since. Harry likes the casino across the bridge. He prefers Harrah’s to a hard-on. Can’t stay with that old codger, but I love the boating part. So what do you say, ladies? I can chip in on gas and groceries.”

Robin and I look at each other and shrug. What the hell.

“I guess I should be grateful,” she continues. “Until I got him to the blackjack tables all he wanted to do was pop his little blue boner pills and make whoopee. He expected me to do all the work, of course.”

But Trish, a recent citizen of Sin City, has had her fill of the gaming life. “I did it all,” she tells us, taking a sip of beer and stifling a delicate burp against the back of her hand. Her specialties were hooking and hairdressing. She danced professionally, too, landing in Vegas after traveling the upper Northwest stripping circuit at a variety of gentleman’s clubs, which for the most part were not gentile. “In Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan they didn’t have a stage; we had to dance on the pool table,” she says. “But the clientele was extremely kind and the tips were excellent.”

Vegas, however, was another story. “Too much competition, too many roughnecks, too many times I got screwed out of money that was coming to me,” she says, shaking her head. “So I auditioned at the Chicken Ranch. At least in the legal places everything is regulated, you get decent pay and regular time off.” She sighs. “You can only put up with that lifestyle for so long. It just got sad. And I got tired of hiding it from my family.”

“Where are they?” Robin wants to know.

“Grand Rapids. Big-time Bible bangers. I call my mom every Christmas.”

“That’s more often than I talk to my family,” says Robin. “My brothers and sisters disapprove of my boat bum lifestyle. With my mom and dad gone, there’s nobody left to stick up for me.”

“You get to a certain age and you realize that you have to do what’s best for you, not what everybody else thinks is best for you,” says Trish.

Am I not the only one who is just starting to figure this out?

Trish and I assumed Robin’d sleep in Blackout’s master suite, but she set us straight. “I never sleep in that bed. Bad memories. One of you take it — or both. It’s big enough. Sorry, the guest berth is covered with tools and boat parts.”

The suite has a great bed, a custom square mattress, unusual in shape and size in the boating world, where beds are usually V-shaped or narrow rectangles in the Pullman style. The navy-blue high thread-count sheets and pillowcases are lush and soft. The navy comforter is neither too heavy nor too light, except when I have a hot flash. There isn’t a blanket in the world that can stay on me during one of those surges.

Robin and I often meet on the back deck for a smoke — our little Hot Flash Club. Smoking cigarettes reportedly makes menopausal symptoms worse, but it sure doesn’t feel that way in the wee hours when your brain won’t be quiet and sleep is only a dream.