Chapter 26: Closure

I decided to pay a trip to see the girls and see how the Italian Dream was doing. I went by myself. I rented a fully-equipped 30-foot sailing ketch, tossed my duffel bag aboard and laboriously loaded a crated-up Browning machine gun as well as four cans of ball ammo. I always carried a Garand M1 with a battle pack of ammo (300 rounds) and an M79 grenade launcher, both in a big rifle case, with twenty rounds of HE grenades that I could shrug on at a moment's notice. It fit under my field jacket which was a bonus. Of course, I always carried my .357 revolver in a shulder holster. I bought a disposable phone and dissappeared for a couple of weeks.

I caught up with Angie and Chrissy on a no-name spit of land just south of Sugarloaf Key at a place called, God help me, Jack's Shack. It was a generic bar up on pilings, where the toilets dumped directly into the water. What a fucking dive. They were slowly getting trashed on Miller Light. The Italian Dream was moored up outside, somwehat worse for wear. It hadn't been cleaned in some time. The windows were crusted with white salt deposits. My pretty girl had been turned into a whore's dog. I was damned tempted to spray paint that on the stern plate. I shook my head. I sat at the rear of the bar, my cap slung low over my forehead, and nursed a bourbon and coke while listening to the girls talk. The desultory snippets that I caught reflected a pair of wasted lives. Everything I'd fought for, everything I'd built, everything that I'd tried to make the best of with that boat was just a broken down pickup truck to them. It left a wretched taste in my mouth. I felt I still owed them some, but not so much now. I wrote a note for my first mate: