2020 by Robert Onopa Page B

the bay out of a Zodiac for a while. Before long his eyes were burning from some toxicity in the air. He moored the Zodiac at an empty slip and walked over to the Swan .
    The Eurasian girl was kneeling on deck, scrubbing corrosion from a winch with a wire brush. The boat was still grimy, black-streaked along the waterline from the frayed truck tires used as fenders, but metal fittings shone along the route of the starboard running rigging.
    “It’s a start,” Voorst said.
    She grinned nervously. On the mast she’d posted the Provisional Seaworthiness Certificate he’d left on deck the night before. “I’m obliged for the thirty days,” she said.
    Voorst nodded toward the scow hull blocking the channel. “That hulk should be towed out tomorrow.”
    Now her smile relaxed. “F’ntastic,” she said. “That’s the one problem I could never solve. I’ve got propulsion—a set of metal film sails that’ve never seen wind, a cranky methanol inboard. . . .”
    He couldn’t quite place her accent: was she a refugee from the fall of Hong Kong? He was impressed, as she went on, by what she knew about sailing, by her ambition to take the boat out single-handed. “What are you going to do for a rudder?” he asked.
    She told him the original rudder was at the bottom of the harbor, just below the stern. “It’s a long story. My old boyfriend . . .”
    “. . . left when the fire started on the QE III,” Voorst told her. “You can see that on the VNN tape.”
    Now it was her turn to be surprised. “I’m the one who found this boat to begin with,” she said. “Stuck this way, filled with a dead man’s kip. All Dana did was lose the rudder when he tried to make room for a stabilizing vane he never did attach.”
    “So what are you going to do about the rudder?”
    “Dive for it,” she answered, grimacing at the slimy water.
    Voorst nodded. “You’re going to need some help.”
    She flushed, started to say no, I don’t, but something in her peripheral vision caught her attention. Voorst tracked her line of sight to a moving group a hundred meters away, above the debris-strewn beach, near a barricaded ramp to the docks: an Army patrol was prodding along fifty or sixty people dressed in the dingy old clothes of the homeless. The sergeant sauntering behind them hefted on his shoulder the distinctive barbed shape of a burn gun, the cruelest of the weapons.
    Now the infrared gun was waved, in a familiar way, at Voorst. He spit into the dark water.
    “I’m sorry I thought you were one of them,” the Eurasian girl said.
    Voorst ran his hand over a piece of coaming, thinking it just needed to be scraped, sanded, and coated to look like new. During the night he’d dreamed of the Swan far out at sea, beyond the greasy slicks and floating carcasses, heeled over in a stiff, open-ocean breeze. “Well, if you need some help. I’d like to see this boat saved, see? I’d like to see you sail out of here.”
    “Look,” she said, still watching the patrol on shore, “those soldiers make me nervous. You might as well come aboard.”
    Voorst stepped over a sagging lifeline and followed her down the companionway, not expecting much. But he found antique wood paneling, blue curtains shading the ports, a spotless galley. The beamy cabin was a museum of old-time comforts like teak book racks and built-in lockers. From the oversize electronics at the aft Nav station he guessed that the boat had last been seriously cruised fifteen years before, around the turn of the 21st Century. “My name’s Rawley Voorst,” he told her.
    “So I gathered from the notice. I’m Tiana Parker.”
    He saw the T-shirt she’d been wearing the previous night on the forepeak bunk. “Isn’t it kind of dangerous to wear Nomad blue?”
    She shook her head. “They’re just people without places to live, for Christ’s sake.”
    “Or people who set fires with Lydex.”
    “If you believe that . . .”
    “It’s not a religion,” he