One

TERRY BAILEY WAS BY far the most interesting man my mom ever married, although I couldn’t be sure that my own dad was not in some way interesting because I only met him once and knew practically nothing about him. Of course, I didn’t know Janie’s dad either, since she’s almost five years older than I am and he was long gone before I came along. Mom always said he was her first major mistake and that Janie was the only good thing that came of that relationship. Even after that, Mom had a run of bad luck when it came to picking husbands, but somehow I knew that she would stay with Terry Bailey. They had already been together almost two years, and that was a lot longer than her marriage to Janie’s father and my dad combined.

Before Terry came into her life and swept us all up in his crazy dream, we briefly had a step-dad named Wayne Delaney, who we mutually concluded was a selfish bastard who would have much preferred to have just Mom without either of us kids attached as part of the package. He positively hated kids, but even so, he was so good-looking, according to Mom anyway, that he lasted almost a year before she found out he was still sneaking over to see his ex-wife on the side. Without a word, she packed us all up one morning when he was away at work to move us five hundred miles from Richmond, Indiana to our grandma’s house smack in the middle of nowhere in north Mississippi. In the tiny town of Calloway City, with a population of only eight hundred people, and absolutely nothing fun to do, Janie and I were certain our lives were over. We just knew that death by boredom would release us from our misery in a matter of weeks.

That was a bit over two years ago, when I was just ten. It was only about a month after we got here that my mom met Terry Bailey, Janie’s eighth-grade history teacher, and from that day forward, we didn’t have time to be bored. Terry turned our lives upside down; introducing us to ideas we had never given any thought to. He challenged everything I had learned about the world prior to meeting him, and at first I hated him because he made Mom get rid of our TV. Terry despised television.

“Look around you, Robbie! They’re like a bunch of zombies!” he said. “Everyone you see is tuned into the tube while they sit around getting fat like a herd of cows ready to be slaughtered. That TV is the cowboy, rounding them up and moving them out, keeping them in line and telling them what to do, how to do it, what to want, what to wear, how to act, and what to say. People don’t think for themselves anymore! The first thing you’ve gotta do if you want to really live, is blow up that idiot box and go outside and face reality!”

Mom didn’t let him blow it up, but she did let him talk her into giving it to one of our cousins after Grandma passed away. I hated her for that at first, but it wasn’t long before I realized I wouldn’t have time to watch TV anyway. Terry said we were building a boat—a freakin’ huge forty-six-foot sailing boat called a catamaran—and we were going to leave before the whole country imploded around us and sail to some island somewhere where he said we were going to live like natives and go spearfishing and climb coconut trees. And when we got tired of that place, the wind would blow us wherever we wanted to go next. It did sound kind of fun to me, at least if I didn’t ever have to go to school again, like he promised, but I didn’t really believe it was going to happen. Nothing I got excited about ever did.

At first, I thought the only reason Terry married my mom was because she inherited Grandma’s house and there was an old barn out back where my grandpa used to have his cabinetmaking shop. Terry said that barn was big enough to build a boat inside, and it was just what he was looking for. He sure couldn’t have built it at his place. Terry was living in an apartment by the school when they met, his study area cluttered with boat plans, piles of books about boatbuilding and sailing and even more books about the islands that he talked about all the time. His walls were practically papered in nautical charts and pictures of tropical lagoons and beaches.

“This country’s screwed, I tell you, Robbie. I’ll be surprised if it lasts long enough for us to finish the boat. That’s why we’ve got to hurry. That’s why we’ve got to stay focused. You want to live to be a teenager someday, don’t you? Then help me mark off these hull panels. If we work fast enough and don’t take any days off, we might get out of here before the Poop Hits the Fan!”

When he talked about this to Mom, he said “shit” instead of “poop.” It conjured a funny image in my mind: somebody throwing big handfuls of turds into the blades of a moving fan and pieces of crap flying out everywhere...hitting everybody! I couldn’t help but grin every time I heard him say it.

But to Terry it was no joke. He said our only hope was to leave. He was always pointing out stuff to back up his reasoning. We would go to Memphis sometimes on Saturdays to buy hardware for the boat, and he would stop by the bookstore near the interstate, always making a beeline for the outdoors and sports section to see if there were new books on sailing or survival.

“See what I mean, Robbie?” he would say, pulling books off the shelf and handing them to me. “Why do you think they’re writing all these survival books all of a sudden? There’s a new one every week: books on living off the grid, surviving an economic collapse, terror attack, Ebola pandemic, zombie uprising... Books on bugging out, bugging in, disaster prepping, how to live after The End of the World as We Know It... Books on survival medicine, storing food, building bomb shelters, life after oil, solar flares, EMP attacks, the Mayan Apocalypse that got postponed... You name it, Robbie, and there’s a book. Some people know it’s about to go down, but look around you, Robbie. We’re the only ones in this section. They’re buying books about vegan smoothie diets and magazines with reality show stars on the cover. They come in here to drink six-dollar frappés and sit there using the free Wi-Fi to surf the Internet on their two thousand dollar MacBooks! You think this can go on forever? Let’s get out of here Robbie; we’ve got a boat to build.”

Even though it was the same every time we went, Terry never missed a chance to stop at that bookstore so he could remind us. Then, on the two-and-a-half hour drive back to Calloway City, he ranted about how stupid it was to drive anywhere and threatened to make Mom sell her car.

“We can get everything we need for the boat delivered to the house by UPS and FedEx. This is insane. Look at these idiots! Eighty miles an hour, and for what? To get home in time to watch the latest Two and a Half Men reruns while they eat their supersized burger combo from the drive-through and take iPhone pictures of their cats to put on Facebook? We make this run one time too many, Robbie, and none of us will survive to sail anywhere; we’ll end up as roadkill snuffed out by a hit-and-run teenaged texter.”

Terry hated driving almost as much as he hated TV. He didn’t own a car himself. When he was still living in the apartment, before Mom married him, he either walked to his job at the school or rode a beat-up old mountain bike. He said we would all be riding bikes once we moved aboard the boat, and everybody else would anyway once the oil dried up or got shut off by a Third World War that he said would start in the Middle East. He said we’d have plenty of room on deck to carry bikes and they would be our transportation on land whenever we stopped in the various ports he said we would visit en route to the islands he was dead set on reaching.

I had my doubts we would ever be sailing anywhere when we started building the boat. I had never even seen the ocean and the only beach I had ever been to was at a park on the shore of Lake Michigan when we lived in Indiana. Calloway City was a long way from the Gulf Coast, but Terry said we would launch the boat in the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway about a hundred miles to the east and float down the river to Mobile, Alabama. He said once we reached the Gulf of Mexico the world would be our oyster and the wind would take us anywhere we wanted to go. It seemed far-fetched, even to a ten-year-old, but Terry had a way of making his dream contagious. It sure swept my mom away, but I think at the time she just thought it was going to be like a long vacation of swimming and lying on the beach in the sun.

The dream first became tangible when a delivery truck from the local building supply came one day and unloaded over a hundred sheets of plywood in front of the shop at Terry’s direction. I had a hard time visualizing that pile of flat wooden panels being transformed into a boat, but Terry said plywood was one of the best boatbuilding materials available, especially for a catamaran, which had to be lightweight, according to him. It didn’t look lightweight to me though, considering that the truck driver had to use a forklift to set the bundles on the ground. The plywood was rough-looking too, just ordinary construction-grade material like they used for building houses. Terry said it would be ridiculous to spend the money on fancy marine plywood for a boat like this, because we were going to cover all the wood with fiberglass and epoxy resin anyway. Terry had all kinds of stories about the various boats he had built and the places he had been. I didn’t have any reason to doubt that he was telling the truth, because I didn’t know enough about either boats or other places to know the difference. What I did know is that he had a near religious belief in the qualities of epoxy resin—that messy, expensive goop that we had to mix together to coat every piece of wood that went into the boat so that water couldn’t penetrate it and cause it to rot. The epoxy was also the glue that we used to assemble the parts, every joint requiring carefully-mixed batches of the stuff that had to be spread quickly before the chemical reaction caused by adding the hardener caused it to get too hot and set up before it could be used. Mixing epoxy was one of the first boatbuilding jobs I learned, and I became the main mixer for big operations that required a lot of it in a hurry.

“There’re aren’t many things in this world you can truly believe in, Robbie. But I assure you, you can believe in epoxy resin. Out there on the salt, when there’s a gale blowing and the waves are as tall as those trees, epoxy resin is the only thing that’s going to hold this vessel together—the only thing preventing you from becoming shark bait. You make sure you get the mix right and you don’t have anything to worry about it.”

I looked up wide-eyed at the trees he was referring to. They must have been fifty feet tall. Could waves really get that big? I was careful when I pumped out the resin and hardener for every batch. Two counts of resin to every one count of hardener. Mix it thoroughly with a stirring stick to ensure that it will react and cure properly once applied to the parts that were temporarily clamped together overnight. After we began the building, I saw that he was right. The epoxy was amazing. Once it cured there was no way to separate the parts. The wood pieces would break before the glue joint failed.

I also learned how to use power tools, and this was the most exciting part of it for me. Terry trusted me with saws and routers that could take off a finger, and belt sanders that he said would grind the meat right to the bone if you got your hand in one. I was scared but at the same time using such powerful tools made me feel grown-up and important. I couldn’t cut a very straight line with a power saw, but then neither could Terry. He said it didn’t matter anyway, because once again, epoxy was the key to everything on this boat and sloppy carpentry work would be hidden by it anyway. Then the whole thing would be painted.

“We’re not building a yacht, to show off to the idiots at some fancy marina. No sir, Robbie, this vessel is our ship. A ship that will take us anywhere we want to go as long as she’s sound and sturdy. Mother Ocean doesn’t give a damn if she’s pretty or not.”

Mom and Janie were involved in the building right from the beginning too, although Janie said there was “no way in hell” she was going to live on a boat and threatened to run away if we actually did it. I knew she would change her mind though; she just had to try and get her way first because she was used to it. And besides, Mom said she was going through that rebellious teenage-girl phase, whatever that meant. Janie’s main interest was boys, and several times during the course of the construction one of her temporary boyfriends would hang around pretending to be interested in helping us with the project. Terry said kids these days didn’t know how to work because none of them had to. He said what they were good at was playing video games and texting, and that most of them could type forty words a minute on an iPhone with their thumbs. He said these redneck high school boys following Janie home didn’t know one end of a sailboat from the other, and could care less, but they made a show of it, hoping to get in her pants before we left. Boatbuilding and sailing weren’t exactly extra-curricular activities in Calloway City anyway, but aside from girls, most of the high school boys were obsessed with one other thing, and that was deer hunting.

“Give them a scoped .308 rifle and put them in a heated tree-stand and they might be able to shoot a yearling buck over a baited field,” Terry said, “but most of them won’t survive what’s coming, Robbie. Hard times are going to call for hard men, and the survivors are going to be the few that can track a deer through the swamp and kill it with a sharp stick. People are going to get so hungry after a while that they’ll take to eating each other, because other people, especially the fat ones, are going to be the only food they can catch.”

“You mean like cannibals?” I asked.

“Yes, eaters,” Terry said, “just like in a Sci-fi novel I read where all modern technology fails and people go medieval. “There’ll be lots of eaters in this country after the doo-doo hits the big ventilator blades. They’ll be the ones too stupid to survive any other way and they’ll eat each other until they’re all gone. Get the stew pot ready, Billy-Bob! Go chop some more firewood, Leroy! Lookie-here, Cletus, we caught a nice fat little 10-year-old porker today!” He lunged at me, pretending to drag me away.

I recoiled in horror, even though I wasn’t fat. Sometimes Terry scared me with the picture he painted of the future. Of course that was his point, to make us all want to go with him, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in the world he described, especially if we didn’t get the boat built fast enough to get out first.

Janie was always telling me Terry was full of shit. She thought the world was going to end too, but she said that it would blow up so fast we wouldn’t feel a thing—probably from an asteroid strike or a bunch of nuclear bombs. That’s why all she wanted to do right now was get high and chill with her friends, because what was the point of doing anything else? But Terry got her on board with the boat project by telling her tales of the islands, where wild ganja grew twelve feet tall in the jungle, free for the taking. He told her this when Mom wasn’t around of course, and because he didn’t care if she smoked or not, Janie begrudgingly began to like him. As the boat took shape, she slowly came around to the idea that we really might be leaving.

I found out that building a boat is not something you can do in a hurry. Even with all four of us working on it almost every day after school, as well as every weekend and all summer, it was a year before the two forty-six-foot-long hulls were built. Then it was another year before they were ready to be moved out of the barn, which was too small for the final assembly into a catamaran and the fitting of the two masts. During the last six months, we worked on it pretty much all the time. Terry resigned from his teaching job at the school and he and Mom took us out of class, saying to anyone who asked that they were home-schooling us.

I didn’t know what was true and what he made up when it came to Terry’s past before he arrived in Calloway City to teach school. He claimed to have first moved to Mississippi to teach graduate-level Anthropology at Ole Miss, just up the road about an hour away in Oxford. He said that before that, he had been a university professor in California for a while after he came back to the States from a 10-year stint of living in the jungles of Irian Jaya, studying a tribe of Stone Age savages. He had so many stories that he told in such great detail, it was hard to doubt him, but on the other hand I didn’t see how any one person could have so many fantastic adventures and know so much stuff about so many different things. He was either the biggest liar or the most adventurous real-life person I could imagine, or more likely, some combination of the two.

I don’t know exactly where he got the money to build the boat either. Even before he quit his job, it wasn’t like he was making much as a history teacher at Calloway Jr. High, and Mom sure didn’t have any money. Janie’s father hadn’t paid her child-support in over ten years, and my dad never paid a dime and we had no idea where he was. Mom made ends meet by working as a receptionist in a dentist’s office back in Richmond before we moved here, and in Calloway City she answered the phones and made appointments for a local attorney.

But Terry didn’t have a car to put gas in like Mom did, and he knew how to squeeze every penny out of a dollar when he bought stuff. He said it didn’t cost near as much to build an ocean-going sailing ship if you didn’t mind doing the hard work and didn’t have to have all the shiny yacht fittings factory boats came with. He ranted about how the local good old boys around Calloway City spent twenty thousand dollars or more for their overpowered bass boats with fancy metal-flake paint jobs.

“They put a one hundred and fifty-horse outboard on the back of an eighteen-foot boat to go bass fishing in a lake less than three miles long! They don’t care what it costs, because all that matters is whether or not they can pay the note every month and still fill up the cooler with beer when they go out. That’s another reason this country’s going down the drain, Robbie—credit! They give it to anybody stupid enough to sign a note and dumb enough to work nine to five the rest of their lives to pay it off. But our boat isn’t some flashy toy to show off at the local lake, Robbie. It’s our transportation, our escape pod, and our permanent home—all for less than the cost of a new Ford pickup that can pull one of those atrocities up the local boat ramp.”

Terry said the main thing we had to buy was the plywood and the epoxy, because for that there was no substitute. But most everything else could be scrounged here and there or made from scraps, rejects or salvaged junk. He scored big on getting all the solid timber we needed for the boat when he mentioned what he was doing to Mr. L.C. Pickens down at the hardware store. Mr. L.C. had an old barn that was falling down that he wanted gone because he was about to plant all his farmland in pine timber—the new cash crop throughout Mississippi. Terry said it was crazy that no one was farming real crops like cotton anymore and blamed it all on the big corporations that made farming an industry and put the little guy out of business.

“Besides, Robbie, people are too lazy to farm these days. Farming means work. Outside work. Hot. Cold. Daylight to dark work, every day. They don’t want to live like that anymore and anyway, they don’t know how. Only the old folks do and they are a dying breed. Instead, everyone who owns a little land plants pine trees. The government gives them the seedlings, they stick them in the ground in rows and twenty years later their kids cut them all down and sell the paper wood to buy dope.”

But Terry didn’t complain about Mr. L.C. wanting his dilapidated barn torn down.

“Look at that, Robbie. This timber is as good as the day it was cut. That’s longleaf yellow pine—one of the finest shipbuilding timbers in the world. You can’t even buy this stuff anymore because they logged it all out when they settled this part of the country. See those big square timbers there?”

He was pointing to the beams that spanned the lower part of the barn and supported the floor of the loft. All I saw was ugly, gray wood, weather-beaten and full of rusty, bent nails.

“Those timbers were hand-hewn by slave labor, you can bet on it. See the marks left by the axe and adze? Everything around here was built by slaves, and not that long ago either. Back then you would have seen nothing but snow-white fields of cotton stretching from here to the Mississippi River!”

“How is this gonna be part of our boat?” I was almost afraid to ask. I knew that whatever he had in mind, it was going to be hard work, and I was right. We spent a week taking that barn apart board-by-board, hammering out or pulling all those rusty nails and stacking the lumber in a pile so that Mr. L.C. could load it on his trailer and bring it to our barn behind the house. It was one of the hardest jobs of the whole project, but Terry said we had better timber than money could buy, and best of all, it was free. And that meant we had saved enough money on wood to buy cruising stores and supplies for an entire year!

“This will be all our structural framing, Robbie; the crossbeams tying the two hulls together, the framing inside the boat, the decks between the hulls; and most importantly, the two masts. Terry said our catamaran was going to be rigged as a schooner. But that didn’t mean much to me back when all I could see was a pile of old boards with nail holes in them. I knew nothing of ships or the sea, much less schooners, but I learned a lot in a hurry. Terry talked about it non-stop while we worked, over meals and during most other breaks. He was truly obsessed with the idea, and was the first person I had ever encountered in my scant years who was so passionate about anything.

His obsessive passion paid off eventually. Once the connecting beams were made and the two hulls were joined together, for the first time since we’d begun, what we were building did look like a boat, or at least a big raft or something that might float. Not that it was pretty or anything—Terry’s work was sloppy—with big runs of solidified epoxy standing out on practically every vertical surface, and rough-cut, ill-fitting joiner work visible anywhere he hadn’t buried it from sight in epoxy and paint. The railings on the outside edges of the decks were made of galvanized plumber’s pipe, and several blue plastic tarps stretched between them and were supported in the middle by two-by-fours serving as makeshift awnings while we worked. He had ordered a bunch of used sails from somewhere online and then recut and trimmed them to the size he wanted using an old antique sewing machine he found at a yard sale. The finished result was not going to be mistaken for a yacht; that was for sure. Even I could see the difference from looking at the pictures in Terry’s books.

It wasn’t like the people in Calloway City knew the difference either, but nevertheless they didn’t like it. To them our boat was just an eyesore—an ugly contraption built by those “crazy people” over on Winfield Avenue. The eighty-something-year-old lady in the neighboring house complained the most: “They’re disturbing the peace. They’re out there running power tools at all hours of the night! They even work on the damned thing on Sunday!” She said this wasn’t a shipyard... and who did Terry think he was, Noah? And on and on....

Terry didn’t care what they said. They thought he was crazy, and he thought they were all idiots. Now that the boat was nearing completion, he told me the same thing every day: “There’s only two kinds of people in the world, Robbie: sea people and shore bastards! Now which one do you want to be? If we don’t hurry up and get this boat launched, you won’t get a chance to decide!”