Sex and the Single Screw

The Charter Business was very slack that summer and by mid-July, the topsail schooner Calypso owed money all round Nelson's Dockyard, and all over Antigua as well; otherwise, I don't think the skipper would have taken on the job. Usually, having six comfortable berths to fill besides our own quarters, we tried to get three married couples, or a mixture of the sexes, anyway, and it helped if one or two of the men knew their way about a sailing boat and could stand their trick at the wheel.

When the prospect turned out to be five girls, and young at that, even George Harkness, who was an enthusiast in this area, must have thought twice about it. But he knew, better than I did, the morbid state of our finances. He knew that the Calypso, launched into the tourist charter trade with such high hopes, wasn't making any money at all. All I knew myself was that, as the engineer, deck hand, cook and scrubber, I hadn't been paid for six weeks and that we had both been living on the world's most monotonous diet, flying fish and chips, since the butcher cut off the credit and the liquor store cut off the tap.

That had been two months earlier. Now even the harbor dues were beginning to look like telephone numbers.

George Harkness was young and goodlooking; I was neither. But that was about the only difference between us. We were both in the same boat, literally, figuratively and fatally. We had to have some cash to stay alive. So when the offer came along, it was almost impossible to resist.

The first I heard of it was on a bright July morning, when we were both busy about our chores. George, having loosely furled the big foresail now dried out after a heavy dawn dew, was on deck, wire-splicing a spare halyard that should really have been thrown away. I was in the galley, up in the forepeak, gutting a little bonito before frying up the same old lunch.

Through the open hatch there was a glimpse of a harbor that I always found sentimentally overwhelming. Its moldering buildings had been storehouses when Nelson was on station here in the frigate Boreas; the ancient embedded anchors had served him as bollards when careening ship; the whitewashed catchment had watered the British fleet since 1700; the worn stone of the quays had been trodden by the young post captain who was to die a vice-admiral of the White at Trafalgar.

It was an honor for the schooner Calypso to be berthed in this hallowed spot.... Then the view was invaded by something rather less hallowed, though not less inspiring: a ravishing pair of female legs, tanned to a golden crisp, topped by lemon-yellow shorts of a shape guaranteed to make old sailors feel young again and young sailors ready for extremely active service.

As I ducked down to take in the rest of this vision, it moved on aft and a girl's voice said:

"Hi, Captain! Are you for hire?"

Though captain was acceptable, and even flattering, hire was not the sort of word that people in the charter business reacted to very favorably: It had undertones of a sail round the bay at Clacton, one pound an hour, pills included. But the voice, which was American, had its own undertones as well, with a bit of melting honey thrown in, and George, though as class-conscious as any of us, must have decided to forgive hire and go for the basic question.

He said, "Yes— come on board," and the next thing I knew, the girl was down in the main cabin and I had a first-class eavesdropper's line onto the transaction.

"I'm Mary-Lou Hanson," she said, still in the same slightly breathless murmur. "I've got some friends—there's five of us all together. We wanted to go for a sail— I mean a cruise."

"How far do you want to go?" George's voice sounded detached, but I was ready to bet that his eyes were busy enough.

"As far as you like," said Mary-Lou Hanson.

George coughed. I judged that he had been at the receiving end of a fiery look, as well as the unmistakable innuendo that went with the answer. But he still sounded businesslike.

"When do you want to start?"

"Now, if you like."

I felt that very soon it would be my turn to cough. The Calypso, though solidly built, wasn't all that soundproof when she was moored alongside in still water, and George, I knew already, was not the sort of young fellow who could remain businesslike forever. I wasn't criticizing; my cough would only have meant, "George, it's the money we need." But, luckily, he still seemed to have the same idea.

"I don't see why not," he said. He began to talk about terms for a week or ten days: the cost of victualing, the arrangements about drinks. Then he said, "What about the rest of the party? How many men?"

"None," Mary-Lou Hanson answered. "We're all girls."

"What? Five girls?"

"Yes".

"But how much experience have you had?" George must have exchanged another of those potent looks, for he added, "In sailing, I mean."

"Not much. Well, none. We just want a little holiday, that's all. Fun and stuff. Haven't you got an engine?"

"Yes. But we usually sail if we can. It's only a single screw."

"Oh, my!" The next sound was of confederate laughter, which I could well understand, and then Mary-Lou said, "I expect we can work something out.... Don't you have someone to help you?"

"Just the man who sails with me."

"How old is he?" The question was really rather odd.

"About fifty," George answered.

"Oh, well."

It wasn't much of an epitaph.

They talked some more and had a couple of drinks— already we were losing money on this deal— and then George said he would telephone in about an hour and the girl took off down the quay. Though I craned my neck until it creaked, I still couldn't see her face. But I saw most of the top half, which went admirably with the legs and the voice. Progress, of a sort.

Presently, George came through into the galley, munching a biscuit, with a predictably silly expression on his face. "I suppose you heard all that," he said.

"Enough."

"What do you think?"

"It's crazy. Five girls.... How will we sail? What will we do all day?"

George grinned. "Mary-Lou, as far as I'm concerned. And if they're all like her—"

"Oh, come on, George. We're chartering a boat."

"Fully equipped."

But though I didn't like the idea, we both knew that the trip was on. It was the best chance in months. There had been nothing from our Miami agent since the beginning of the year, and the tourists sent down by the local hotels always went for the three big Chris-Crafts that were the pride of the bay and the curse of honest sailors. Calypso could never match such elegant runabouts. She looked only what she was: a tough, salty schooner, converted from a Grand Banks fisherman; roomy and comfortable, with polished mahogany instead of plastic rubbish but without the frills and the chrome that caught the customer's eye.

We couldn't compete, and we had to. For us, from the very first week, it had always been chicken one day, feathers the next; and we had been at the feathers for an awful long time. Five girls? We had reached the stage where we would have taken on five performing poodles and clipped them real good.

"All right," I said finally. "Give the girl a ring. But we need fuel and we can't stock up on anything unless you get something in advance."

"I said that would be the deal. Didn't you hear?"

"No. That must have been when you were murmuring.... Is she pretty?"

"Gorgeous. Like a—"

"OK, OK...." I was still rather grumpy. "By the way, I'm forty-eight."

"Well, good for you!" George grinned again. He was 24 and looked it. "Perhaps she'll bring her old mum."

• • •

There were no old mums in the party that trooped aboard at sunset. Though I'm bound to say that I never really got those girls sorted out properly, item by item, with their labels attached, one thing I could swear to: They were the best-looking bunch ever assembled within the timbers of one 65-foot hull.

Apart from Mary-Lou Hanson, a glowing brunette who was probably the pick of the crop, there was a tall blonde like an inverted Eiffel Tower and a smaller blonde straight off a Pirelli calendar; a (continued on page 134)Sex and The Single Screw(continued from page 108) Titian type with marvelous green eyes and another fiery redhead with the most remarkable self-sustaining frontage since the figurehead of the Cutty Sark.

They were called Samantha, Ellen, Judy and Raquel— not necessarily in that order—and they brought to our staid male-fibered schooner a delicious aura of good looks, sex, soft femininity and lively humor. It was like some dusty Vatican seminary suddenly going coed.

They stowed away their gear—though there seemed very little of this—and then rum punches began to set the tone of the evening. One would be a fool not to drink rum in the Caribbean, whatever one's previous tastes. Rum was cheap, smooth, gut-warming and insidious; it broke down and then it built up again, in a different pattern altogether. We had an hour of this delicious nectar in the main cabin, all bright eyes and laughter and honeymoonish jokes; and then we set sail.

We didn't get very far that night: not in sea miles, anyway. We ghosted down the coast from Nelson's Dockyard and into Willoughby Bay next door; and there we anchored, after an hour's lazy sail under a marvelous yellow moon that gleamed on everything—the rippling water, the silver shore line, the palm trees at its edge—as if the pointing finger of the night sky wanted to show us the best that heaven could do.

I cooked dinner—the smell of charcoaled steak again, after all that bloody fish, made me feel quite faint—and then we settled down to the most cheerful meal the Calypso had seen since we brought her south from Nova Scotia. The girls had "changed," in the sense that bare shoulders had become a very loose phrase, indeed; and as I came in from the galley with the heaped platter of meat and vegetables and surveyed those five paragons ranged ready under the lamplight, I thought that no man could ever have counted up to ten so easily.

They talked, and laughed, and squirmed a good deal, and ate like little horses, and seemed so delighted with their surroundings, and indeed with the whole world, that I could not quite believe it. It was like a rum-scented, sensual, come-hither paradise, and there was no such place.... George was the center of attraction, just as he should have been; he was in his element, sharp as a row of spikes, and he was being paid for it; the only trouble was plurality.

I thought, sarcastically, "If you just play your cards right, my boy...."Myself, I was just the spare hand, and already bashed about by a whole arsenal of the weaponry of life, and 48.

But I still couldn't make the girls out. Mary-Lou Hanson seemed to be the leader, but the leader of what? They certainly weren't a family. A club? Some kind of staff party? A piece of a charter flight? They didn't seem at all interested in telling us. At one point, Mary-Lou had said, "Oh, we're just friends," and that was all.

When I asked one of the girls—I think it was Raquel, but it might have been Judy—what she did, she said, "I'm a sort of teacher."

"What do you teach?"

She looked at me with fathomless eyes. "Physical education."

That, at least, I could believe.

But it was not for me. George Harkness was the star: Let him shine all over.... A couple of hours and many cups of coffee and rum chasers later, I took a load of dishes into the galley. Through the hatch I heard Mary-Lou, following up one of the evening's favorite jokes, say, "I do like your ship, George. Though it's a darned shame about that single screw"; and then, in a much more decisive tone, "Well—who's first?"

Here we go again, I thought resignedly; but I could not be surprised. I had become used to the idea that ships and boats did funny things to people, men and women alike; it was a fact of life, like litmus paper turning red. People always behaved on boats as they would never dream of behaving anywhere else in the world; and they did it quicker.

Perhaps it was the glamor, or the briny air, or the blessed isolation, or the freedom that this cutoff life inspired. Maybe one sort of movement led to another. Whatever it was, the potent magic worked as soon as the passengers came on board.

We had once had an English couple: youngish, probably not married, but of the most reputable background—I think they were both schoolteachers. But they did not stay schoolteachers for very long. They were drunk as coots from beginning to end;they sang the most hair-raising songs at the first plonk of a guitar; and they were both as randy as a goat farm in spring. Even on the first night, they started one hell of an uproar on deck, about midnight. Keeping prudently out of sight, we could only hear the squeals of laughter, the sound of thudding feet, and then the voices:

"Come on, Arthur! Chase me!"

"I'm tired. Get down off there. Why don't you come back to bed?"

"I've told you. I want to do it up the mast!"

After that, I never even blinked.

• • •

There was a lot of activity that night; George must have been as busy as a one armed paper hanger, though the simile was not particularly appropriate. At this point, it might be worth detailing the Calypso's sleeping arrangements, since they were obviously going to be important. George had his own cabin, amidships. I had a much more humble slit of a berth, opposite the galley, with my feet in the chain locker. The girls were spread around in pairs in the big two-berth cabins.

Three cabins and five girls left one spare bed—or, to put it another way, it left one girl on her own. Obviously, it was going to be put this other way, if the traffic was anything to judge by.

Isolated in my narrow lair, I dozed off to sleep, to the music of ripples running against the hull that could not entirely mask all the other jazz. Once again, this caper was not for me. George was the star. Let him earn the money.

He looked pretty terrible the next morning when he tiptoed into the galley: pale, with circles under his eyes you could have used for saucers and yawning like the lower end of the Grand Canyon. He drank quarts of black coffee, some raw eggs in Worcestershire sauce and then a mixture of rum, Fernet Branca and iced lime juice. Then he said, "I think I'll go back to sleep. Give me a shake at twelve."

It was not to be. The pattern—and the battle order that presently emerged—was quite different. George was to be on duty day and night. It was Judy—or Samantha—who gave him his shake: not at noon but at 8:30 A.M.

By day three, still at anchor in Willoughby Bay, we worked out a routine that would at least look better in the history books. One girl stayed on board with George while I rowed the four others ashore and we had a picnic, above the tidemark among the palm trees and the dappled sunlight.

It was beautiful beyond compare—and so were the girls, who by now were topless and unashamed, and emerged from their swim like streaming goldfish, and flopped down like gamboling puppies. They were very good company. We ate golden slices of papaya, and drank pale Barbados rum by the five-liter keg, and dozed a lot.

They seemed to have worked out their own routine, very happily, without quarrels. There was the Dish of the Day, who stayed on board with George; and after that the Late Night Snack, who was not my worry, either. I had my own small paradise at last, and it suited me wonderfully, from the top of the sunny sky down to the soft warm ground.

In fact, I was doing much better than the top-rated gladiator. Someone once said that variety was the best aphrodisiac, and at the beginning, George probably found that this was true. But by day five, (continued on page 214) Sex and the Single Screw(continued from page 134) he was visibly flagging. He must have been discovering, rather too early in life, that enough was enough.

There came a day—just after sunrise, which seemed to be his only free time—when he appealed to me to take my share of the load.

"How about helping me out? If I don't have a day off soon, I'll never get ashore alive!"

"But you're doing fine, George," I assured him. "Look at the girls. They're in terrific form! They're happy as clams!"

"So they damned well ought to be," he said sulkily. He was sucking at a restorative prairie oyster, his shoulders slack as a frayed deck mop. "But even clams close up at low tide. ... So how about it?"

I shook my head. "Not me. I'm too old. You said so yourself. Just let me handle the picnics."

"It seems to me that's a pretty easy job."

"I have to do an awful lot of rowing."

• • •

Calypso, gently changing her anchorage now and then, never got very far on that ten-day cruise. But we did make one daring sea voyage, of at least 50 miles, southward to one of the fairest islands of all the Leewards, Guadeloupe. Here we found another bay, happily called the Petit Cul-de-Sac, even more beautiful than anything on Antigua.

It became our private domain—except for George, whom I would not have trusted to step into the dinghy. Here we could pluck our own ripe papayas from the tree and gorge ourselves on their dripping flesh. Here I lay at ease, like a Greek on a vase, among my frieze of nymphs. Here I did a lot more rowing, and dreamy talking, and dozing off; while George, marooned on board, and now the very ghost of young manhood, did his best.

But he was always moaning. He was even limping. He was really too young.

On day ten, or rather night ten, we had a marvelous sail back to Antigua, in time for the girls to catch their plane next morning. I was alone on deck, alone in a magical night, nursing the wheel with my bare foot: Calypso, slipping up the northeast trades on a soldier's wind and a sailor's dream, was nicely balanced and needed only a touch now and then.

The sky was a maze of watchful, loving stars: From the little radio that could coax so much from the giant nothingness of the world, music was borne on the velvet air; a reggae—not a jumpy one but a soft and stroking one—waiting across a wine-dark sea from Martinique.

Toward midnight, first one girl, then two, then four joined me, sitting close in the cockpit, humming to the music, leaning against me when they thought that they might be cold or that I might be lonely. Then it was all five girls. Mary-Lou Hanson, the last incumbent, who had not been expected, came clambering up the ladder. She sounded rather cross.

"He went to sleep!" she said, scandalized. "Would you believe it?" And then, more softly, "I've brought you a rum whatnot."

It was very welcome. "But what about you?"

"I've brought a whole big pitcher of it. Might as well be neighborly."

We were neighborly. The girls sang softly, and moved in and out of the green-and-red glow of the navigation lights, and climbed about me, and snuggled up like furry lizards; sometimes there seemed to be warm hands fluttering all over, coming from anywhere out of the night. The rum went down. It was a secret picnic again. Hands became kisses. Kisses became hands, asking the same questions but more firmly put.

"We all took a vote," a voice said out of the darkness. "We like you better."

"Well, that's a nice thought."

Another voice: "Can't we stop for a little?"

Calypso was still in 60 fathoms: and the automatic, as usual, was out. "No," I said. "I've got to steer."

A wail: "But it's the last night!"

It's wonderful what you can do when it's the last night.

• • •

George never reappeared till all was over. He was still oceans deep in sleep, his snores resounding throughout the boat, rhythmical as the distant surf, when we berthed at sunrise in Nelson's Dockyard and the girls prepared to leave.

With much giggling and hugging, they gave me a farewell present. It was a colored drawing, executed in garish crayon by Ellen—or was it Raquel?—and really done very well. It was a picture of a papaya tree. Nestled among the green leaves, two huge papayas shone rosy and pink, with a glint of sunlight falling on their proud curves.

"It's for you!" they said. "First prize! We'll never forget those papayas!"

"Nor will I."

"Goodbye, darling. We'll recommend you to all our friends!"

Loading the last of their gear into the taxi, I asked one of them, "But who are you, exactly?"

"Just girls."

"You must be fooling!"

Mary-Lou took charge. "We didn't want to say at the beginning. It might have embarrassed you. We were running a sort of sauna bath in New York, Forty-fourth Street. But it got raided."

I wasn't too embarrassed. "So?"

"So we couldn't get bail. They kept us in for three whole months! Then they said, 'Not guilty, but don't do it again.'So we thought we needed a holiday. Someone said yachting was the thing. So we came down here."

"Was yachting the thing?"

"Every time!"

• • •

George Harkness emerged at noon, looking like a slug, blinking like a derelict lighthouse, quite horrible.

"Have they gone? Thank God for that!"

"Oh, I thought it was rather fun."

"If you'd had to do the work I did. ... Oh, well, they sure got their money's worth." His eyes fell on the picture.

"What's this?"

"Just a leaving present."

"For me? How sweet. Flattering, eh?"

"Well, no. It's for me."

His crocodile eyes widened. "You're joking! What did you do? Damn it, it must be for me. I did all the work, didn't I? I can tell you, I had a pretty tough time."

And I had had enough. "You had a tough time!" I looked at my gleaming papaya tree and back to George. "You're complaining! See the chaplain! What do you suppose those picnics were like? You just had the fun. Rowing four girls at once, two trips, day after day, takes stamina!"