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

coats of quick-drying epoxy, two top coats, and two coats of bottom paint. The meeting had been frustrating and long, but now we could move forward quickly.
    This turned out not to be the case, however. I had to leave for a day and a half to meet my charter guests and their professor down the coast, and when I returned, I was disappointed. I told Seref we weren’t going to make it at this pace, but he ignored me until it was too late. Probably this was intentional. He forced me into a compromise. The floors in the staterooms would not get done until the end of September, just before I sailed for Mexico.
    Seref and I were not getting along. I told him directly, as we stood in the hot sun in the dust: “You promise things, but then you don’t deliver. You’re too slow. You should have had ten guys working on this immediately, but you didn’t listen to me, and now you’re not going to be able to do it on time. Which means, to me, that you’re doing this on purpose, because I know you’re a smart man.”
    â€œDavid, we will do this job. Really, you must not talk like this.”
    â€œHow are you going to do it, Seref? You’re already too late.”
    These conversations usually ended in silence, filled with what I believed to be mutual regret. Too many things had gone wrong, the boat an enormous weight dragging both of us down. We took turns making excuses. Seref made excuses about botched and late construction; I made excuses about late payments. The war in Kosovo was killing both of our businesses. He was doing less than forty percent of his usual business, even with the Brits, who tend not to be deterred much by war or terrorism, and he was suffering especially from his new rental cars. I suspected he had bought some of these cars in the winter using my money. I suspected that a month or two of construction in the winter had not actually happened. But I couldn’t know for sure, and there was no possibility of recourse in the Turkish courts, anyway.
    I spent every day at the boat, trying to hurry the job along. I also tried to encourage the use of safety harnesses, since the men with the sanders were up on scaffolding. They laughed at me, the silly American trying to hand out his safety equipment, but one day, after I made Baresh and Ercan put on sailing harnesses with tethers leading up to stanchions, Baresh slipped and fell off the scaffolding. His sander and the board he was standing on fell twenty feet to the ground, but he was left dangling in the air, held by his tether. Several men pulled him up on deck, and after that I was teased less. Ercan, however, blamed the fall on the harness and tether. “If he not have this equipment, he never fall.”
    I’d had other impossible arguments with Ercan that summer. On one of the earlier charters, for instance, I had asked him to install siphon breaks for the bilge pump discharges, but he refused. “This not my job,” he said. “This things not necessary. This not my job.”
    I didn’t like arguing with him, so instead I tried to show him. We had some water in the bilge, so I had him watch the water level as I turned the pump on and off. Each time I turned it on, the water level went down. Each time I turned it off, the water level went up and kept rising until I turned it on again. “You see?” I asked. “The discharge has formed a siphon. This is what happened to the engines, too. The water coming in from the bilge pump could actually sink us. Which is why we have to use either a one-way valve or a siphon break.”
    Ercan smiled. “It doesn’t do this before.”
    â€œThat’s because we just filled our water tank and partially filled diesel,” I said. “It will happen every time we’re heavy. Ecrem should have cut the discharge holes higher, but he didn’t.”
    â€œOther boats don’t need this,” Ercan said. “I see many other boats. This is