Drago #3. Art Spinella
stood watch on the forward top-deck with a cabin running halfway along the hull length. Both levels were punctuated with square windows. Amidships on the lower level a pair of sliding cargo doors. A single stack belched black smoke as the ship made way toward Bandon.
“Damn,” Sal muttered under his breath.
“Can you read the name?”
Sal peered long and hard at the bow and shook his head.
“I don’t see any crew or passengers,” I said.
The decks were loaded with barrels, lumber and crates. No people.
Just as Sal reached in the pocket of his jacket for his cell phone, aimed the camera at the paddle wheeler, the ship blipped and disappeared. The paddle’s churning wake subsided. The river as barren as if the boat had never been there.
We both fell into our chairs.
“Cool.”
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“You saw a ghost paddle wheeler,” Chief Forte laughed. “Look, guys, I can’t help you on this one.”
Sal and I were sitting in the Bandon Police chief’s office, a couple of mugs of cop-shop coffee on our thighs. Forte had just walked in the door. We had been waiting for him after making a quick stop at the Human Bean for some early brew then raiding the Bandon Police Department’s coffee cooker for refills.
“This was not an illusion,” I told him, knowing he’d never buy the story. “Well, maybe. It was gauzy, like a mist with form. Clearly a paddle wheeler, though.”
Sal added, “You’re gonna say it was a projection or a hologram or some other stunt, but the legend of a ghost paddle wheeler has been around for decades and decades. Long before there was holographic technology.”
I added, “As high school kids, we’d go down the river with a keg, sit on the banks and wait to see the ghost ship.”
“And did you?”
“Well, no.”
Forte shook his head. “My suggestion? Stay away from the Dos Equis for a couple of days and don’t go near the river when you’ve had a couple too many and are sleep deprived. Now get the heck out of here. I’ve got rabid field mice to contend with.”
Sal and I glanced at each other, rose from our chairs and left the still half-full coffee mugs on the counter on the way out.
“And by the way,” Forte said, “if you run across the ghost of Hiram Walker, let him know I’d like a case of Black Label.”
Sal made a rude gesture over his shoulder.
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Sal and I spent the next three nights sitting in the same lawn chairs on the same dock. I wasn’t sure we were doing it because we wanted to see the paddle wheeler again or just because it was something different. Both of us had been bored to tears since our respective female counterparts had fled the scene.
“Don’t think we’re going to see the boat tonight,” Sal said.
“Maybe. Maybe not.” I took a long swallow of still-hot coffee from my travel mug.
“Ever miss living aboard your trawler?”
I had to think about that because it was potentially a loaded question. “Let me answer this way. If Cookie weren’t in my life, I’d still be living aboard. I don’t miss Dragonfly when she’s here. I would miss it if she wasn’t.”
“Very diplomatic. Now the truth.”
I gave my head a Bandon scratch – three fingernails at the front of my hairline, face scrunched like I just smelled a dirty diaper. “Yes. But if you tell Cookie I said that, I’ll deny it, then fire bomb your house.”
The trawler was a 36-footer, built in 1932 and powered by a one-cylinder Buddha diesel. On its best day it would hit a staggering eight knots. It had spent most of its life in Monterey, California and later San Pedro.
The first year was devoured as I turned the utilitarian cabin space into the equivalent of a studio apartment. First rate galley; mahogany counters, table and cabinets; teak floors, walls, ceiling and trim; upgraded electronics; leather lounge and a whopping good entertainment center. The forward bunk area, cuddy style, was fitted with custom mattress and the appropriate single-guy mood lighting.
The rear deck was stripped of all its fishing-related tanks, machinery and paraphernalia, replaced with cushioned lounge couches, storage locker, moveable tables and a Tiki-style bar. Hey, it was the ‘80s. The hull and top side were painted white with crimson trim and the name Dragonfly scripted in gold leaf on the stern.
The boat was the love of my life. And the perfect bachelor vessel.
Then Cookie came along and, long story short, we decided to move back to my hometown of Bandon. Dragonfly had to be part of the deal, though. I’d grown attached to the trawler and like most guys getting rid of a toy is like ripping your heart out, one aorta at a time.
The trip from San Pedro to Bandon in an eight-knot antique is a story all its own, left for some other time.
“Well, we should get the heck out of here,” Sal said.
Nodding, the chairs folded, we walked up the ramp to the parking lot.
Then a blip on the water. Not sure it made a sound or we just sensed it, but there in the overcast darkness of an Oregon night, the same paddle wheeler we’d seen a few nights before. Sal dropped his chair and reached for his cell phone. Clicked it open, punched a nub and clicked a photo of the gauzy boat as it churned its way downriver.
And just as suddenly, a second paddle wheeler appeared. This one to the stern of the first looking as if it were carved from smoke. Less defined than the first. Larger. Noiseless except for the distinct sound of the wooden hull creaking.
In the pilot house, a mystic figure, hands on the spoked ship’s wheel, eyes blank, dark medium length beard on a hawk-sharp weathered face. And three crewmen standing on the bow, unmoving, each staring forward, watching the sternwheeler ahead.
The captain and deck hands flickered like static. Scratchy images drawn with colored chalk.
Without eyes. Only smears of white where they should be.
I heard Sal click another photo just as the tallest crewman on the bow inched his arm upward and pointed toward the first paddle wheeler. As if on signal, the other two deck hands raised their arms in unison marked by motion blurs like they were being swung through tendrils of steam. Pointing with seemingly transparent fingers.
The captain’s body turned. White voids where his eyes should be. And with deliberation he raised an arm and pointed directly at us.
Then they were gone.
Sal was first to speak, the tone hushed, an uncharacteristic quiver. “I think I need a donut.”
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Sal and I sat in my dining room staring at the two photos the big man had taken and printed. The first showed the smaller paddle wheeler, the one we had seen four nights before. It was hazy but defined enough to make out the deck-side barrels and crates. The other was of the two boats nose to tail, not more than 20 feet between them, but the second stern wheeler was nothing but a white smudge. Indistinct as if someone had smeared Vaseline on the camera lens.
“Odd.”
“Truly.”
“It would be tough to I.D. what the second boat is unless you’d seen it for yourself,” I said.
Sal leaned back, lifted the picture of the two paddle wheelers, staring hard at the image. “Truly odd, Nick. What do we do about it?”
Bandon head scratch. “Got me. Stash the pics under X Files, I guess.”
My