Read Online A Mile Down by David Vann - Free Book Online Page A

went through his usual expressions of disbelief: how can this be true, this can’t happen, this isn’t possible, etc. “It’s true,” I said. “I’m looking at a large piece of paint and epoxy just hanging at the waterline. And I need to move the boat now, to sail to the next port, which means some of the paint is about to be stripped off of the boat. You have to fix this.”
    â€œBut how? How can this be?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “But we might have to sail to Bodrum after this charter and haul out for a quick paint job, maybe ten days. You’ll have to rent another boat to run the next charter, which has only four people, and then, after the painting, we’ll motor the 220 miles again from Bodrum to Antalya to pick up the last charter. I can’t think of anything else. I shouldn’t have to be dealing with this. When you build a boat, you should build it to last more than a couple of weeks. You’re going to redo the deck seams, too, and take out that laminate crap on the floors in the staterooms. It’s all buckled now, so that some of the doors don’t even close. Please arrange all of this today.”
    I tried to tell my guests in light, funny tones that our paint was falling off, as if it were somehow amusing, and then we pulled out of the harbor and headed up the coast.
    It was a lovely day, with calm water and blue skies, and all of us, guests and crew, took turns leaning over the side to watch large patches of white paint and paste flex and shiver then fall off, sometimes in sections as big as four or five feet long by three feet high. It was all coming off, one whole side of the boat. There was nothing I could do but keep to the schedule and come to grips with the fact that we now looked like a military vessel, stripped down to our gray primer over steel, all the welding ribs showing. I felt terrible about polluting the water, but it just wasn’t realistic to try to recover each of the fifty pieces as they ripped off, especially since they sank quickly. And I couldn’t have just stayed in Kas. That’s the main rule in charter. Unless you’re held hostage by terrorists or government authorities, you stick to the itinerary and give the guests their vacation, no matter what’s happening to the boat or the crew.
    The rest of that charter, I was making arrangements. By the time we arrived in Gocek, there was another, smaller charter boat waiting at the dock for my next guests. Seref and I had fought over who would pay for this, and I had lost. He would pay for the emergency haul in Bodrum, and the labor to recaulk the deck. He would also redo the floors, and repaint the boat, but the paint company would have to pay for the new paint, and I would have to pay for the difference in cost between the two kinds of deck caulking, the new wood for the floors, and this smaller charter boat for my guests.
    Out of the water, the boat looked like a yacht on one side and a battleship on the other. Seref’s cousin and Mustafa, the owner of the yard that had built my hull, came down to look at it. Seref’s cousin rich as ever, a handsome, tall, European-looking man with possible mafia connections wearing thousands of dollars of the finest clothing. Mustafa, shorter and homely, smoking his pipe as always. Then the insurance man arrived, then the representative from the paint company, and everyone examined my boat before driving to Mustafa’s yard to look at a boat under construction. The hull had been fared with epoxy paste, and small circles were drawn all over its surface to show bubbles forming under the paste, sections that were pulling away from the hull. Seref’s cousin’s boat had already been launched. Like my boat, large strips of its paint had fallen off. Finally we gathered in Mustafa’s office to discuss the problem.
    This discussion took some time. In the end, we agreed the company would provide two