Jessica Sennett
Anchor Hitch

Amelia Ball and Thor, the heroine and hero of this short story, originated as secondary characters in Herman Wouk’s novel, Don’t Stop The Carnival. This is a fictionalized expansion piece that gives Amelia Ball the internal monologue she never receives in Wouk’s work.

Thor couldn’t stop yelling when they left Kinja Island. He was overjoyed.

“Moonglow, my love!” he crooned at the sailboat over and over as the sun set on their celebratory departure from Gull Reef. Amy sat near him and laughed freely, releasing her long fiery hair from its usual entrapment on the top of her head. She had sold her hotel! Her shoulders were lifted of the great weight that had nearly sunk her months ago. She never was a businesswoman, and was happy to shed the role as such.

Let Paperman learn the hard way, she thought, with a tinge of guilt. Paperman had seemed like an amiable enough chap, but she had no intention of feeling responsible for his future as owner of that impossible hotel island. In fact, most of the Caribbean Islands were impossible to live on. Perhaps this is why I love them.

She immersed herself in Thor’s spirit. She’d reach her hand forward occasionally to tickle the golden hairs on the back of his calves as he regally maneuvered their wooden sea beast through rugged waters. The sky was illuminated with amber and ochre rays that slowly dissolved into Tuscan red and blushing crimson. The clarity of the water deepened into a cobalt blue and was then lost.

Thor demanded that she take the helm. He showed her how to fish off a sailboat during the oncoming darkness.

“A short line is ze key to success on a moving boad,” he cried with a grin, as he tied a cheap rubber squid to the end of the monofilament.

“Wootwootwoot!” Amy cheered him on, with one strong arm raised in the air as she drunkenly and superficially guided the wheel. She was charmed by what simple measures it took for him to be happy. A minute later, he had yanked a snapper up into the air and slammed it down on the deck. It writhed and gasped. The poor thing was so helpless, yet she couldn’t wait to devour it. She watched its life trickle away.

“Now let us feast!” she roared. Thor pulled her away from the helm and dragged her into the cabin, the dead fish in his other hand. The wide cabin cushions were covered with blankets: the British flag, various plaid patterns. These, and the dark mahogany walls, made the place still seem like the previous, English owner Tom Tilson’s lair.

“Damn that Tilson. He’s really very British. He even gave us a John Atkinson blanket!” Amy chuckled under her breath. For a moment, she had begun to think of her own father’s collection, sitting on his office couch at the old Oxford house, the couch she used to fall asleep on every night. Then Thor flung the fish on the counter and pinned her down on one of those cushions.

Thirty minutes later, naked and covered with sea salt and sweat, they baked their fish, finished off three cans of caviar, and guzzled another bottle of Champagne.

“Ve’re on our vey now,” Thor said, and quickly passed out among their spread, empty cans and bottles surrounding him, his head leaning on the back of a protruding bench cushion. Amy grabbed a blanket, wrapped it around her body, and stumbled out to the deck, singing “The Bold Grenadier.”

As I was a walking one morning in May

I spied a young couple a makin’ of hay.

O one was a fair maid and her beauty showed clear

and the other was a soldier, a bold grenadier. 

 

Good morning, good morning, good morning said he

O where are you going my pretty lady?

I’m a going a walking by the clear crystal stream

to see cool water glide and hear nightingales sing.

 

O soldier, o soldier, will you marry me?

O no, my sweet lady that never can be.

For I’ve got a wife at home in my own country,

Two wives and the army’s too many for me.

No one could have heard her. She was completely alone, Thor was asleep, and she could float in and out of her own dismembered consciousness and taste her past life as the images, sounds and songs floated around her head. She didn’t have to hide.

So she opened the blanket and lay down on the wooden baseboards, her legs and arms and hair spread wide. The stars were popping out, and she hummed herself to sleep. Memory swept over her, a blanket of mixed emotions. She saw her mother’s face float over her just then on the empty deck floor—her mother’s usual concerned look masking any real complexity of emotion, a phone cord wrapped around her arm in a nervous fixation.

“Your father is going to leave me, Amelia,” the mirage echoed through the sky. “He said there’s nothing left for him here. He thinks I’m all used up, and all that is left of me is my anxiety. Do you think that’s true, Amelia? Do you?”

Amy groaned slightly as she mentally bid the mirage farewell. She felt weak and queasy. Her mother dissipated into the stars and dissolved into a thousand sea particles. And then Amy dove into pure, empty darkness and stayed there until the sun rose.

The next morning, with her eyes barely open, she had seen a trace of her Swede’s hair in the sky. Thor pinched her bare stomach as he sauntered past. He seemed to have already been up for hours, climbing the mast and adjusting the sails.

For these first couple of days at sea, his eyes flitted around wildly, landing on her only when she smashed her body against his. She would take his face in her long hands, which felt lusciously feminine up against his strong, immense cheekbones. It was the way to turn his gaze inward. Those moments were tantalizing but rare. She knew that the sacred, silent moments shared between them combined with his rough passion for her could someday be more profound than his desire to sail. But maybe she didn’t even care. Maybe all she had really cared about was to be him, mirror him in all ways, and breathe in his musk.

Five days later, when their feet touched Colón’s pier, things seemed to change. The dynamic that she and Thor had shared on land had been altered by the sacred Moonglow. They were bound to each other in a new way; their isolated moments at sea put a new weight on their connection. They had spent long hours every night in conversation, even if some discussions only subsisted of the weather and their next meal. Thor could barely stand to leave the boat after he’d tied it with a round turn and two half hitches. Amy could barely stand to leave him alone for fifteen minutes on the pier.

As soon as they’d arrived in their new cabana and set down their bags, Thor swiftly decided to take off in pursuit of a bartender gig. He changed into the dashing white suit she’d bought him the day they left Gull Reef, and she slipped into a bikini. They made their way to the private beachfront. Amy felt solemn as she settled into a white beach chair.

“Don’t vorry, sveetie. I just vant to have some independence, you know? I’ll be back once I find a job.”

“I’ll wait for you right here,” she grinned up at him from the chair. She watched as his muscled body sauntered along the path to the city. From a distance, he seemed to walk on air, a heroic angel among mortals.

Panama was different than what she knew of the Caribbean, but her knowledge was quite limited to the island of Kinja. Colón was a blur of commerce, less romantic and calm than her old Kinjan island. Spanish was spoken freely, and Amy only remembered a few words from her high school class. She tried to put them to work as best as she could. The prospect of meeting an American or Brit seemed rare.

Amy felt restless in her Irish skin. The sun rattled her freckles and beckoned them to grow. She got up from her chair and ordered a planter’s punch from the bar hut. It was even boozier than Thor had made them at the Gull Reef, and even though she had been drinking since morning, her anxiety was still mounting. There wasn’t enough alcohol in the city of Colón, or the country of Panama, to ease her nerves.

Thor, my suave hunk, she thought. He would balance the fruitiness of the Grenadine syrup, the tartness of Florida lemons, and throw in a dash of bitters to bind the booze into the drink. It was like drinking silk, it went down so smooth. Thor always had a way with cocktails.

That first day, a mammoth of a man disembarked his gondola onto her hotel island in Kinja. His bronzed skin sparkled. He had a charming Swedish accent and rippling arm muscles. She hired him immediately and slept with him not long after that. She was intrigued by his missing two fingers and his life at sea. She fell in love with his detachment, his eyes that always seemed to dream of elsewhere, and his wild spirit that she believed matched her own.

She settled back into her chair. The sky began to turn into a bland gray fog. She had nothing to do except think about her family. She felt disdain for her mother, who had called only a week prior to “The Great Kinjan Escape,” as she had jokingly called it to her now distant Amerigo-based friends. Tom Tilson never believed that she would actually do it—buy his boat and set sail the same day. Perhaps it was her mother’s news that made her want to slip further into the ocean with her fantasy man.

She realized that Thor knew nothing about this part of her, and she knew nothing about his family. They had thrown conventionality so far into these Caribbean waters, that they still lacked a true sense of traditional intimacy. Without this, she knew she could barely hope to keep Thor in her grasp. She feared he could easily exchange one woman for another. He was a hunk, yes, but it somehow felt as if she were dating a painting. Looking at him was like gazing at renaissance art at the National Gallery in London, as she had done frequently as a young college woman: luminescent colors of the sunlight reflecting off the hair and clothes, the smooth and ripe-looking flesh, and the unanswered darkness in their fierce human eyes. She found solace in those paintings.

I’ll float in my head, he’ll float in his, and the sailboat will keep us together in this limbo: flat, comfortable, and exhilarating—the way life should be. She was determined to make that connection last, just as soon as he returned. She only hoped that her desire for commitment to his sublime beauty wouldn’t scare him.