And the Sea Will Tell by Vincent Bugliosi, Bruce Henderson Page B

he called for Jennifer to take over. At sunrise, they switched places again, and she promptly fell exhausted into the bunk. She wondered, before going to sleep, if every day of the voyage would seem as long as the first one.
    Buck had often fantasized about sailing around the world. But he found the reality of being on a small boat at sea much more enervating than his dream. His seasickness worsened the second day, and he ended up spending most of the first week in bed.
    Alone at the helm, Jennifer elected not to struggle with the mainsail—it took more brute strength than she could summon—but to stay with the jib. That kept them going slowly, bobbing laboriously through the waves.
    Buck was depressed even before they started, and now he was the grumpiest she’d ever seen him. She knew it wasn’t just the nausea from the undulating sea or his fugitive status ( that curiously never fazed him), but the recent death of his father in a construction accident. She tried to respond to Buck’s emotional needs. When he wanted to talk about his father, they talked. When Buck wanted to be alone—which was most of the time—she respected his silence.
    Buck idolized his father, describing him at various times as “the most dominant figure in my life” and “the most fascinating man I ever knew. I was like a wart on his nose, never tiring of watching him.” Buck would say that in his father’s approval he soared, while his disapproval “was bone-crushing.” In Buck’s eyes, there simply was no positive human characteristic his father did not possess. He was “handsome, intelligent, had extraordinary logical ability, and no one could possibly resist his charm.”
    Jennifer had met Wesley Walker on several occasions. Her perception of him was markedly different from Buck’s. To Jennifer, Buck’s father was a wanderer, a dreamer, a loser. (He was also a rigid disciplinarian, quite the opposite of Buck’s complaisant, overly protective mother, Ginger.) He also had an insensitive streak that she’d found disturbing. When Buck was in the fifth grade, a bully had chased him home from school. He complained to his father, but was told to figure out a physical way to deal with the threat by himself. Buck’s solution was to hide a length of two-by-four in the bushes halfway between school and home. When the bully chased him the next day, Buck stopped for the board and clubbed the surprised bully into submission. That evening, when the other kid’s parents appeared at the Walker house to complain about their son’s injuries, Wesley Walker ordered them off his property. Then he put his arm around his son and congratulated him. “Dad taught me two lessons that time,” Buck explained to Jennifer. “To think for myself, and it never hurts to carry a big club.” Another maxim he told his son to live by? “Try always to be straight with yourself, however much you may con the world.”
    Ailing in the Iola ’s cabin, Buck tried to suppress his nausea with food. An experienced sailor had advised him that keeping something in his stomach when seasick would prevent the dry heaves. So he started every morning with a pot of tea, biscuits with honey, and generous helpings of oatmeal. He dumped spoonful after spoonful of sugar in the hot cereal, hoping it would give him energy. After eating, however, he promptly went out to the railing and—as old salts say—fed the fish. Then he’d go back to bed for an hour or so before wobbling back into the galley to make another meal for himself from their precious hoard.
    Jennifer had spent more than a thousand dollars—virtually all of their money—stocking up on supplies for the trip. She had concentrated on the basics, like rice and soybeans and flour and sugar, shopping for bargains and making purchases in large enough quantities to get discount prices—such as a fifty-pound sack of red beans, which she knew to be a good source of protein. They had packed away a lot of canned goods,