That morning, like every morning, Cara awoke to the light peaking through the window, the lapping of the waves on the jetty and the smell of saltwater and sweet magnolia wafting through her room. Sitting up on the edge of her bed, she let her head clear, then stood up and pulled on the shorts she had worn the day before.
"I'll bet he's still out there", she thought.
He was. In the corner of the oak-paneled great room her father sat at his mahogany desk, his shorn head resting on folded arms snoring, his open laptop illuminated with the words of his latest manuscript; a fifth of whiskey, nearly empty, sat by his head. Passed out like this, he looked older than his 46 years. The tall, lean, physically imposing man, looked like a latter-day Bartleby the Scrivener, physically and intellectually exhausted.
"He's reached the end of his rope, time for him to dial it back," she thought, looking at him and smiling. "But at least he's been working. Who the hell knows what he did with his time before I got here?"
She glanced at the bottle.
"What would his readers think if they saw him like this?" she smirked.
But this was how he worked. Hour after hour for as long as it took, digging deeper and deeper into his characters, driving a narrative on, subsisting on Jameson and Oreos. Never one to keep regular hours, he would work himself into a state of total concentration, where he might remain for days, scouring his brain for the just the perfect phrasing and unleashing his prodigious imagination into his writing.
Letting her mind wander back to her childhood, she recalled many evenings, relaxing aboard their boat after a long day sailing, when she would beg him for stories and he would oblige, concocting vivid tales, full of eccentric characters embarking on adventures in far off, exotic places, featuring her, as always, the heroine. Cara leading an expedition up the Lomami River to rescue kidnapped Americans. Cara in the mountains of South America hunting narcotraficante assassins. Cara taken prisoner by an evil Bedouin sharif and escaping to take her revenge. Cara the hero. And as the sun slid from the sky and the rocking of the boat and the sound of his voice lulled her into a dream, she lived out an adventure, created especially for her.
As a young child she lived with her mother in New Mexico and visited him as regularly as his service in the army airborne would allow, while he deployed from place to place. Romantic places all, in her youthful estimation. His relationship with her gorgeous Latin mother hadn’t amounted to much more than a night. A night of youthful foolishness when his airborne division burst into town, fresh off maneuvers in the Mexican desert, looking for a party. A night they spent creating her. He hadn't known she was pregnant until she tracked him down months later. But in spite of his youth - he was only 22 at the time - he seemed thrilled at the prospect of having a daughter. Anyone who knew him growing up would have known why. His only sister Mary, the youngest of nine children in the Irish Catholic family that raised him, had died at only seven years of age from childhood leukemia, making him view his daughter’s arrival, in some sense, as Mary’s return. They named her Cara, a Gaelic name, meaning darling, beloved, friend and he lavished attention on her, spending all the time he could with her, wanting her to love everything he loved. He particularly wanted to pass on his love of sailing, a mania since his childhood in Baltimore where he, his father and brothers had sailed the Chesapeake. Most of his fellow airborne, more attune to the traditional wish of men for sons, were impressed but more than a little baffled by the depth of his devotion to this little girl.
In 1992, after his return from the Gulf War, her mother, driving Cara home in the pouring rain from a weekend visit at his place, lost control of the car, crossed the center line and slammed into on-coming traffic. Both were air-lifted to a shock trauma unit, where her mother died only hours later. After two months in intensive care and several surgeries, Cara remained in the hospital to convalesce for another month before she was released. Her father was at her side the entire time. Reproaching himself for being the cause of the trip, and if possible, becoming even more protective, he realized that he would never be able to devote enough time to her in the military; so he left at the end of his enlistment and the two of them moved to the Florida Keys and bought a small cottage on Tavernier Key. They were joined by his closest friend from the airborne, Dylan Corcoran, who had left the service six months earlier to pursue a writing career, and his daughter Katie. In this sailor’s paradise, the two girls, who had known each other forever, quickly became inseparable, sailing with their fathers beneath the enduring warmth of the tropical sun in the delicious breeze on the open water and, in the evenings, dashing recklessly about the marina, while the men tended their boats.
An obsessive reader and writer since childhood with a uniquely Irish lyricism, and without a regular paycheck after he left the military, her father resolved to make his writing pay for him. Beginning by freelancing fiction and articles on sailing to any periodical that wanted them, he gradually built up a reputation. Still, both men needed money for the short term and it seemed like their best opportunities lay with the military. As combat veterans of the Gulf, the Balkans and numerous African and Central Asian scrapes, they had built up contacts both inside and outside the military. So while they made their bones in the literary world, they resorted to illegal activities that made use of their skills. At first it was small time stuff, smuggling night vision goggles to the Nigerian military, GPS equipment to the Colombian police, mortars to beleaguered Bosnians in Sarajevo. The more they did, the more they were asked to do. After gaining the trust of foreign military leaders and government officials, they began to be in demand for their expert advice in strategic and tactical matters, for which they were handsomely paid.
Another trait, traditionally ascribed to the Irish, that her father and uncle Dylan shared, was the ability to hold within himself, apparently without conflict, both the sacred and profane, the moral and immoral, honesty and deceit. As loving and loyal as they were toward their daughters and friends, they were equally cold-hearted toward those they viewed as enemies and contemptuous toward authorities who got in their way. It seemed that he and her uncle Dylan plied their new trade without the slightest bit of remorse. They took jobs in the Balkans, Somalia, Chechnya, East Africa and, after 911, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the money rolled in.
Despite all these preoccupations, they still made time for their daughters and, of course, much of it was spent sailing. Becoming expert sailors and learning to love life at sea, the girls particularly enjoyed the Caribbean, weaving in and out of the Windward and Leeward Antilles, spending nights in wharves from Martinique to Curaçao or in the cabin of the boat while their fathers talked literature and warfare on the deck above. Arriving at a wharf, the girls would jump out of the boat and enjoy staggering like drunken men, trying to maintain their balance as their bodies adjusted from the pitching deck of the boat to the motionless planks of the wharf.
One evening, like so many others, while she and her father relaxed aboard, she asked him how the Caribbean Islands came to be called windward and leeward. From the point of view of European sailors, he explained, who were sailing in from the east on the trade winds, the islands that lay in the direction from which the wind blew were windward and those in the direction toward which the wind blew, leeward. Even at her young age, she had become proficient at recognizing windward from lee, that nautical context that so completely baffles land-lubbers. As with most sailing jargon, these terms have mystical connotations. For example, he told her, the lee shore had a sinister reputation amongst sailors in those days and was often referred to it “the great whore”. For, because the wind blows in toward a lee shore, it tempts weary sailors to land, often to their doom, crushed on rocks, run aground on hidden bars and, assuming they reached shore, exposed to gale winds. Moreover, returning to sea against the wind could prove next to impossible. Hence, the term “on a lee shore” became a metaphor for those desperate situations in life, when one is beyond help facing certain doom.
But now was 2011 and it had been a year since his most recent novel had come out to limited success, the New York Times calling it a dim reminder of his former powers. This last disappointment was only the latest of three novels, each acceptable on the its own but mediocre by the standard he had set for himself. He had been that good. In one sense, they couldn’t be called disappointments because he never seemed to expect or care about success anymore. Not since uncle Dylan died suddenly three years ago. This, from the man whom she remembered being so excited on the eve of a book’s release. He now seemed adrift in guilt and regret and had become prone to crippling bouts of depression. Her once dynamic father seemed to corrode into the recluse she now knew.
Critics had once compared his work to the Russian masters, his characters inhabiting a spiritual landscape every bit as rich as their physical circumstances and actions, exhibiting good, evil, heroism, banality and childishness in an astonishing amalgam that nonetheless rang true. If one judged by the discussion of his work on Internet fan sites, his readers wondered about the man himself. To write as he did, what must he be like? What must he be capable of? As a child, he was simply her father, the man she had known her entire life. Later, she would to ask herself these same questions.
Of course, pious was an adjective that she never had been tempted to apply to her father. She loved him because he was always so good to her. Both he and uncle Dylan, in unguarded moments could be extravagantly profane, like most military men, and she had countless memories of them associating with people of obviously dubious character. Then, well after her father had become successful with his writing, she moved to Baltimore to study at Johns Hopkins. His shady dealings with the military weren’t news to her, she and Katie had overheard enough whispered conversations and “make sure colonel so-and-so doesn’t know” to guess that his dealings weren’t completely legitimate, but in Baltimore, she heard rumors from friends of the family that her father and uncle Dylan were involved in far more. According to the rumors, in order to protect their property and avoid constant shake-downs, they found it necessary to deal with organized crime, and before long, through payoffs and criminal profit-sharing, were making money from loan-sharking and money laundering.
Violence and killing were the job of armed forces, particularly the elite 82nd Airborne. The story that would haunt her for life, she heard when she was just twelve years old. One summer night, unable to sleep she crept out of her room and eavesdropped on him and a group of army buddies - uncle Dylan among them. They were telling stories from their service in the first Gulf War. He regaled them with one about a time when, after completion of the air war, they along with the rest of their company, parachuted into the Kuwaiti desert to take up positions a few hundred yards in front of the Iraqi lines. Snipers and observers, their orders were to keep pressure on the Iraqi line to discourage forward movement while Schwarzkopf and his divisions turned the Iraqi right flank. One morning an enemy soldier emerged from a bunker, squatted down and proceeded to relieve himself directly in front of them. Her father calmly raised his rifle, sighted in on the hapless man and shot him through the neck. Stricken, the man immediately sat down in his own filth and bled out without falling over. At this, the room erupted in laughter and obscene exclamations as he sardonically took bows and offered his thanks to the academy. She had spent every day since then reconciling her doting father with that cold-hearted killer.
As his novels failed one after another, he withdrew from public life and decided to build the bungalow in which they now lived. He took pains to keep its construction out of the press and built it far off the main road with a hidden entrance to avoid being harassed by celebrity hunters. Rustically exotic, and the complete opposite of the brownstone he maintained on the upper west side, it looked like something out of a John Huston movie, sitting on four acres of pine, palm, buttonwood and magnolia. The interior consisted of a great room where he worked, watched TV, listened to music, drank, quite often slept and entertained, also a kitchen, dining area and four bedrooms. The furnishings were from the first half of the 20th Century, dark oak accented in black with a smattering of art deco. Modern technology, though omnipresent, was carefully concealed or understated. The bungalow backed up against an inlet and had a dock at ground level with a jetty that serviced his 30-foot sailboat. As soon as the bungalow was completed, he spent less and less time in New York and more and more here. Her communication with him, once constant, had slackened and the indications that alcohol and depression were taking a toll increased to the point that she began to consider leaving Baltimore and returning to the Keys to be with him.
A paroxysmal return to sailing accompanied her arrival and they sailed whenever they had time. When they were not sailing she would tend bar at a tavern up the road which, for some reason, entirely unknown to her, had come to be called the Boiled Parrot. Passers-by, however, would never have known this, for it had become nearly impossible to read the sign that dangled precariously above the front door; caked as it was with the sediment of the passing decades. But that was just fine by its regulars, this was a place to escape tourists not welcome them. That its regulars were locals was an aberration indeed in the Florida Keys where garish, Birkenstock-shod interlopers seemed to have infiltrated everywhere even remotely worth infiltrating, and had in many ways turned an American original into a theme park. The Parrot, however, stood its ground and belligerently refused to move forward in either space or time.
From opening until six or seven, The Parrot was the domain of grizzled older men with their prime far behind them, though she doubted most of them had ever had one, despite their drunken tales of daring-do on the high seas. When the evening rush began, if it could be called that, the patrons were of a decidedly more varied set. Some middle-aged, meeting friends with whom they drowned the work day, spent catering to the hated tourists, in liquor and laughter. Some younger, tattooed and completely uninterested, like the Parrot itself, in getting on with their lives, smirking at each other's sarcastic quips and competing for preeminence in affecting the most sullen deportment. Still those salty geezers, though dwindled in number by attrition of funds and sobriety, hung on until closing, like gargoyles on Notre Dame, giving the place its atmosphere.
Arousing herself from her reverie, she nudged her father to make sure he was okay before wiggling her toes into her flop-flops and stepping through the door into the cool morning sand to begin her walk to the Parrot.
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