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I’M WATCHING YOU

01 Tuesday Aug 2017

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“Where did you come up with this story?” A friend commented, after reading my new novel, Whom Fortune Favors. “I never knew you had this much imagination.”

Now, I’ll take a compliment any day, even if it is not quite accurate. So I didn’t correct my friend by saying that when it comes to writing fiction, I’ll choose observation over imagination every time; because stories worth writing are everywhere around us, in our families and friends and the untold trials and triumphs of the people we see every day. Far from sitting at home imagining things, we writers are more likely to find inspiration by thoughtfully listening to someone who despises us for who we are, or how we look, or for the ideals we hold. Our best stories happen when love and understanding overcome ignorance and hate.

If you identify as a writer, you’ve probably already met someone with “a great idea for a book.” They may sit at the bar and relate the action and events of a complex plot until your eyes glaze-over. That’s imagination. But these barstool authors seldom describe the depths of their characters; the motivations, obsessions, fears and compulsions of the people they are writing about. That’s observation. And observing the human condition is the only way to give depth to characters whose voices will advance our plot through dialogue.

Of course, writers like Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling can floor us with imaginary landscapes and creatures. But I believe that they are actually the keenest observers of all, because when I read Harry Potter I am in the head of a pre-adolescent with an unhappy home life who is discovering his magical powers. Hermione, Ron Weasley and Draco Malfoy are as real as the kids playing next door, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Dumbledore and Hagrid in mufti at the local supermarket. When Rowling writes dialogue, I’m in that conversation. That is why J.K. Rowling is a genius; she makes her characters so genuine and familiar that we hardly notice that the magical spells and fantastical beasts are not real.

That is what observation does for us – it gives us insight into the human condition – and helps us to understand how people react to events and relate to each other in the crisis points and sweet moments of their lives.

Isn’t that what we really want to write about?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Unknown Shipmate

05 Friday May 2017

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Shipmate

The Second World War ended five years before I was born, so when I literally stumbled over this gravestone I was both mystified and intrigued. How did a German U-boat sailor find his eternal rest behind a gas station at the corner of Farewell Street and Van Zant Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island?

This was in the summer of 1972 when I was young and newly enlisted in the US Coast Guard. I never would have noticed the grave in the small military cemetery had I been travelling back to my ship by automobile, but in those carefree days my friends and I got around quite handily by walking and hitchhiking. And since there was no internet, I had to ask some of my older shipmates to learn that, yes, a U-boat had indeed been sunk near Block Island in the closing days of the war.

Some years later I was steering a Coast Guard 40 foot utility boat across Rhode Island Sound when I noticed a magenta warning on the chart, “UNEXPODED ORDINANCE, MAY 1945.” Some of the saltier fishermen in Point Judith remembered the two day bombardment which had sunk the U-853. Others had tales of U-boat sightings close to shore on misty mornings, and even of being approached by German sailors looking for any fresh bread, milk or eggs that the Rhode Island men might have aboard their trawlers. There were also two huge bronze propellers, said to come from the fabled U-boat, on display in front of a dive shop on Thames Street in Newport.

The U-853 was calling to me.

When I finally dove to the sunken wreck, it was with a group of divers from Connecticut who claimed to have abundant deep diving experience. But when we got down to the U-853 in about one hundred feet of water, it was little more than an eerie pile of rusty steel melting into the bottom, where men had died and were still entombed. My not-so-experienced companions quickly gulped most of the air out of their dive bottles by blowing giant bubbles from their regulators while rooting around for souvenirs on a former mother lode of relics which had long ago been stripped clean. It was almost immediately time to go up, which was fine with me even though I still had plenty of air, since my overwhelming impression of the experience was, I shouldn’t be here.

Still years later I was a crewmember on the US Coast Guard’s sail training ship Eagle for a port call in Hamburg, Germany, which coincided with the 60th anniversary of the Eagle’s launching there as the Segelschulshiff Horst Wessel. We were graciously received by the City of Hamburg and many people were delighted to see “their” ship once again. Of course everyone in the Coast Guard knows that the Eagle once sailed under the Nazi flag and that it was taken from the Kriegsmarine as a war prize after WWII. Many of the Eagle’s current crew are familiar with the subtle reminders of the Horst Wessel which have been covered, painted over or redesigned — like a bad tattoo — to fit the ship’s new American image. But when we were shown a long-lost newsreel of the Horst Wessel being launched, and then stood at the very spot in the Blohm&Voss shipyard where Adolph Hitler and Rudolf Hess had stood in 1936 to cheers of “Zeig Heil!” as our ship slid down the ways … that made the hair on our necks stand up.

We were also privileged to meet several old men who had sailed on Horst Wessel, back in the day. Most of them had volunteered for the Kriegsmarine late in the war, when Horst Wessel was armed with anti-aircraft guns and sent into the Baltic with a crew of raw recruits. Few survived the war, but they felt young again to stand on the decks as our shipmates, as surely as if our service to the ship was not separated by six decades. This is the way of a square-rigger, after all, where tradition and the lore of the sea dictate a common bond among all who have served under sail, everywhere and always.

So for many years I have considered the entombed sailors in the U-853 to be my unknown shipmates. Nearly all of them had trained aboard Segelschulschiff Horst Wessel. They had stood watches on the same decks, climbed the same masts to set the sails, and had held the spokes of the same ship’s wheel in their hands, as had I aboard the Eagle.

Which is why I sat down and wrote The Sailmaster as my therapy.

Why Do eBook Authors Quit?

30 Monday May 2016

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Because nobody buys the book, of course.

Sure, there are some awful efforts  posted online, but some good reads only sell a few copies before they are forgotten. It’s frustrating to craft a project that goes nowhere, and most of us would rather be writing the next book before spending hours divining the power of keywords or solving the mysteries of  promotions for a finished work.

So here it is: Whether it’s a toaster or a novel, online sales are driven by customer reviews.

After all, if someone commits to reading Stephen King, James Patterson or Nora Roberts, they pretty much know what to expect. But who the hell is D. S. Cooper? That is why writers want to leave the reader with a jolt of emotion and the burning desire to tell someone about this book I just read! You want them to write a review as soon as they put the book down. And if I ever figure out how to do that, I’ll become a successful Kindle author!

It is very nice and productive to get feedback from readers on my website, especially when it develops into a continuing correspondence, but those e-mails do little to entice other readers, since only Amazon reviews push future sales on Kindle. So I’ll go ahead and belabor the point: If you want people to read your book  you’ve got to have some stars on the Amazon sales page.

On the other hand, no one likes to get snarked, or to get panned by a reader channeling a NY Times reviewer with broad criticisms such as, “needs more character development,” or “the author needs to set the scene better.”  That sort of stuffing always leaves me wondering if the reviewer even read the book.

But for all I know, the worst reviews are probably right on. After all, I’m just some guy with a notebook computer and an irrepressible urge to spin a yarn.

How We Write

07 Saturday May 2016

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My dining room table was my first writing station, mainly because I was confined to the first floor of my house at the time and that table was the only flat surface which could accommodate my wheelchair, once we raised it 2 inches with blocks under the legs.

Five years later, I’m out of the wheelchair and getting up and down the stairs quite nicely on an artificial leg, but I’ll still sit down there nearly every morning for the views out the windows and the easy access to the coffee pot. These days I’m rewriting my first complete manuscript, which I first wrote there after the flying accident which sent me into early retirement and thus started my e-book writing career, Moons of the Sierra Maestra.

Moons was never meant to be an e-book. Rather, it was a naïve attempt to publish a novel the ‘conventional’ way, which never quite got off the ground. As soon as I finished the first draft, I promptly sent all 975 pages out to my first readers. Big mistake! But much to their credit, three of my friends actually read the bloated tome and provided positive feedback, even though by then I knew, as well as them, that it was awful.

It was my late friend and mentor since high school, the prolific (72 titles in print!) author Roy F. Chandler, who recommended that I forgo agents and publishers and concentrate my efforts on e-books. I have no regrets in taking that advice to heart. I’ve learned a lot and derived a great deal of satisfaction from writing and self-publishing five little books, rather than spending lonely years grooming one massive manuscript for multiple submissions to agents and major publishing houses. How many potentially marvelous novels have languished as rehashed manuscripts until abandoned or taken to their graves by frustrated authors?

So this is how we write today. We do our best work and publish it ourselves.  We learn to control our alliteration and our similes and we allow the dialog to carry the narrative. We try to write simply and truthfully about things that matter. We read voraciously. We jump through the same hoops as the fortunate few who learn the craft by writing for newspapers and magazines before tackling their novels, and although we may never realize the same profits or fame, we are published authors.

That is why on the very same day that my rewrite of Moons of the Sierra Maestra is finally completed, I’ll publish it on Kindle and move on to the next project.

 

 

 

Corsair Canyon

18 Wednesday Nov 2015

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When quartermaster Tom Hamblin awakened Melinda with an intercom call just after three in the morning, she pulled on her Coast Guard sweatshirt and went straight to the pilothouse.

“What have you got?”

The interior of the Tuckernuck was full of shadows and the dim glow of red night-lights, except for the fluorescent lamp over the chart table.

“I overheard some radio chatter from the Rescue Coordination Center in Boston, Captain. One of our Pelican helicopters is missing.”

Melinda felt the emotion rising in her chest. When she sucked in a deep breath to hold her feelings down, it pinched her heart. But she held fast.

“No distress call?”

“No. The last thing Boston heard, they were getting ready to hoist a sick crewman off a Taiwanese long-liner. That was almost an hour ago.”

“Did you copy a last known position?”

He swept his hand towards the outer margin of the chart and stopped at a spot on the edge of the Continental Shelf, where the shallow water of George’s Bank dropped off into the abyss of the deep sea.

“Corsair Canyon. Too far offshore for us, but I thought you’d want to know, since your husband …”

“How are the wind and seas out there?”

“The automated weather buoy is reporting ten-foot swells.”

“Right.” Melinda bit her lower lip in a moment of hesitation. She stepped out of the pilothouse and looked around at the calm water of the boat basin and into the sky, which was being swept by fast moving clouds. When she leaned back into the pilothouse, her mind was made up.

“Go ahead and wake up the crew, Tom. We’re getting underway.”

Quartermaster Tom Hamblin dove into the passageway leading below decks and began turning on lights and rousting the crew. A few moments later, Ensign Nichols and Senior Chief Johansen joined her at the chart table.

“That’s way outside of our patrol area,” the ensign dutifully observed.

“Our patrol area boundaries are just lines on a chart, XO.”

“They can’t send us way out there,” Dag Johansen complained. “That’s nuts!”

“Boston hasn’t given us orders to go.” Melinda said. “My decision.”

Johansen gave her a sideways look and asked, “Is Kyle on that helicopter?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Does it matter, Senior Chief?”

“Nope.” Johansen turned and dove down the passageway into the boat, saying, “You’ll have engines in five minutes, Captain.”

A few minutes later, Ensign Nichols took the helm and backed the Tuckernuck away from the pier. They idled out of the boat basin and past the little lighthouse on Race Point and came up to half speed between the jetties. Then Melinda pushed the throttles down all the way, and they rocketed into the night with spray flying off the bow and the diesels thundering.

“We should slow down, Captain,” Ensign Nichols suggested as they rounded Point Rip.

“Hold your speed, XO.”

The seas grew larger as they approached the edge of the North Atlantic Ocean until the Tuckernuck was vaulting over gray rollers in Great Round Shoals Channel. With each airborne leap, the boat’s contents went weightless, and then slammed down when the hull landed into succeeding waves with explosions of spray. The cups and plates in the galley, the tools in the engine room, and the crew’s personal items in their lockers all rattled and shook, each adding their distinctive sound to the cacophony.

“Captain, we’ve got to slow down,” Nichols said, holding onto the console and the helm to keep from falling down. The lights of Nantucket were disappearing in the shifting mountains of waves surrounding the Tuckernuck.

The ocean ahead was a black abyss.

“There’s no point in going if we don’t get there in time to help,” Melinda told her second-in-command.

“Captain, the air station has launched another helicopter to rescue any survivors. And there is a C-130 aircraft circling overhead by now. They don’t need us out there.”

“I’m aware of that, XO. Helicopters and airplanes get the glory and the headlines, but somebody always has to get down and dirty between the waves with a boat to finish the job. That’s us.”

“Captain,” Nichols pleaded, “we can’t go on like this. The boat won’t take it!”

“Stand down, XO,” Melinda calmly said. “Quartermaster Hamblin, take the helm.”

“Aye aye,” the quartermaster said, taking the helm from Ensign Nichols, who stood aside and held onto the chart table to keep from being knocked off his feet by a steep train of waves. By then the Tuckernuck’s bow was knifing into fully developed ocean swells, throwing huge plumes of dark-green water aside.

“Captain, I have to formally object to this course of action. We should slow down and return to our patrol area immediately.”

“That’s fine, Ensign Nichols. Since you’re no help here, please remain in your stateroom until I have a chance to address the matter.”

When Nichols went below, Melinda and the quartermaster were left alone in the wheelhouse.

“So,” Tom Hamblin gave her a wry smile as a big wave tossed the boat and they both hung on. “How do you like command at sea, so far?”

Excerpted from the novel ROYALS ALL THE WAY!

Night Flight

14 Saturday Nov 2015

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Billy Coates

After a few glimpses of lights on the island and a few minutes of dead reckoning, he turned east and descended through the clouds and into the mist until the rotating beacon of Katama Airport came into view.

Billy Coates came over the beach at ninety miles per hour, seventy-five feet over the dunes. He pulled the throttles back and turned slightly to get the runway directly under the beams of his landing lights. When he was just above the grass, he held the nose up and gave a shot of power to slow his glide.

Touchdown.

The grass runway was smooth and groomed and he rolled easily to the dark restaurant at the far end. When he turned around and cut the engines, a car which had been parked nearby with the lights off pulled alongside his wing.

Three men got out of the car. Two of them wore dark suits with narrow ties. The middle man of the trio was stumbling and the other two in suits held him up as they approached the right wing.

Billy never got out of the airplane. By the time he opened the door the men were up on the wing and shoving their charge into the back seat. Under the glow of the cabin dome light, Billy saw a good looking young man with a prominent brow and flowing hair.

The senator, he immediately knew. He’d never met the man, but everybody had seen him and the other members of the famous family around Cape Cod.

So that’s what this is about, Billy thought. The party must have gotten a little out of hand.

One of the men settled into the back seat with the senator while the other took the right seat up front.

“I’m Billy Coates.” He offered his hand to the middle-aged man at his side.

“Okay, let’s go,” the man said, ignoring Billy’s hand without introducing himself.

“Yeah,” Billy drawled as he recovered his hand. “Fasten your seatbelts, please.”

Billy started the engines and lined up with the runway. There wasn’t much wind, so he’d takeoff over the water. When he turned around to check on his important passenger, he saw the other man in the back seat putting a black pill into the senator’s mouth.

“How about we get a seatbelt around the senator?” Billy tried to be diplomatic.

“How about you just fly the damn airplane, kid. We’re fine back here.”

Yeah, Billy thought. If this takeoff goes wrong and we crash into the ocean, the seatbelts won’t make much difference. We’re dead either way, you arrogant prick.

He pushed the throttles forward and the Apache jostled along the grass runway. The dark ocean ahead offered no discernable horizon so Billy relied on the instruments right away, trusting the fates of all aboard to the spring-loaded needles and wobbly old gyroscopes of the gauges on his panel. By the time he had the airplane turned back towards Falmouth, they were above the haze and the clouds. The moon, when it rose above the cumulus, was new. Only a sliver of the orb was illuminated.

The man in the right seat leaned towards Billy to be heard over the engines.

“Where is Falmouth?”

“About ten miles on the nose,” Billy said.

“You’d better know what you’re doing,” the man growled.

“Yeah. You’ve got that right.”

Or what? Billy thought. You should have though of that before you got into my airplane on a foggy night and started issuing demands.

Billy caught a glimpse of the lighthouse at Nobska Point through the broken clouds and he pushed the nose down as he turned along the coast south of Falmouth. The lights of houses and roads vanished and then reappeared in patchy fog. The landing gear came down after he turned inland over Waquoit Bay and crossed Route 28. Then he turned left and pulled the throttles halfway back when the church steeple was under his left wing.

The runway lights at the far end came into view first, but its near end was masked by trees until the Apache was skimming over the branches.

Billy pulled the throttles all the way back and dropped the airplane onto the narrow airstrip. He had them stopped before they rolled past the hangar, just beyond mid-field. He pulled up to the office and there was a sudden silence when he shut down the engines.

“Let me get that,” Billy said when the man in the right seat hastily tugged at the door latch. He had almost broken the handle before Billy reached past him and easily released the door. Then the three passengers hustled out of the airplane.

A black Cadillac appeared from out of the shadows and the senator was shoved into the back seat. Billy was left standing next to the Apache at the deserted airport. Fog was rolling in over the trees.

“Remember our deal.” The man pointed at Billy as he got into the front seat of the Caddy. “This never happened.”

I don’t remember agreeing to that, Billy mused.

“Yeah. So who do I invoice for this flight?”

“It’s all set. You’ll be taken care of.”

I’ve heard that before, Billy thought. Most of us write our own checks, but the really rich guys have aides who never seem to get around to paying the bills.

And good luck getting in touch with these guys after their tail lights disappeared down the gravel road through the pines.

Excerpted from the novella  FLIGHT FROM KATAMA by D. S. Cooper

Read the eBook for $0.99 at http://amazon.com/dp/B00QKOJBR8

The Sailmaster

02 Monday Nov 2015

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“So you’re back,” Barlow stated in a quiet voice, as he stood behind the helm and raised his binoculars to the horizon. “I knew you would sail on the Eagle again.”

“I had to come back this summer.” Riley stood to the rear of the squad of cadets on steering detail, with his hand on the spokes of one of the Eagle’s three teakwood wheels. “Especially this summer.”

This was the first midnight watch out of New London. Boatswain Barlow had given the helmsmen the command to sail Full and By. To keep the bellies of the square sails filled with air while holding a course as close to the wind as possible.

“Then you know?”

“I know,” Riley admitted. “They are forcing you to retire.”

“Pipe down, shipmate. We don’t want everyone to hear.”

Boatswain Kurt Barlow had sailed on the Eagle longer than anyone, even Captain Ross. The Coast Guard Academy the sailmaster aboard year after year for his unique knowledge of America’s Tall Ship, and because his enthusiasm for the sea and it’s lore had become an inspiration to generations of young officers in training. At a full fathom in height, with a climber’s lean frame and powerful forearms and hands, Barlow was the epitome of a sailor.

Most of all, he loved the Eagle.

“What will you do?” Riley wondered.

“I haven’t given it much thought.”

“But you’ve made a career out of the Eagle. The ship is all you’ve ever known.”

“That’s true,” Barlow muttered. But what would Riley know of such matters? He is still a teenager, after all.

Riley was silent as Barlow scanned the moonlit edge of the sea with his binoculars. Until the young sailor finally said, “Will you ever tell me your thoughts about that day, Boatswain?”

“You know that we never mention that day.”

“But this is your last chance. If you leave the ship I may never see you again.”

Then Riley leaned close behind Barlow, hanging from the spokes of the wheel.

“What do you really remember of that day, Kurt?”

Kurt Barlow lowered his binoculars.

“The blood,” he whispered.

The words were spoken without his turning towards the young sailor, in a low voice free of emotion or doubt, as if he were speaking to the cold dark sea itself.

“The blood. There was so much blood. Until that day, I never knew that. I never knew how much life could bleed out of one person.”

Excepted from THE SAILMASTER

Original cover art by Dane at eBook Launch

On Dynamite Mountain

17 Thursday Sep 2015

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A brief excerpt from my second novel, The Old Cadet

They had not ventured far off the trail and into the forest when Derek stopped and pointed at the ground.

“Try not to step on it. This is one of the oldest living things on Earth.”

Lulu bent down and took a closer look at the vines.

“Blueberries?”

“No,” Derek said with a hint of reverence, “this is a box huckleberry plant.”

“Explain, please.”

“All this is one plant,” Derek pointed to low vines spread among the trees in the distance. “The box huckleberry reproduces by spreading roots and cloning itself. Individual trees and bushes come and go, but these same vines might have been clinging to this hillside for a thousand years. Maybe more.”

“And why does some mountain man care about these scraggly vines?”

“I have no idea why. But, find the box huckleberry, and you might see boomer.”

Lulu stood up. Then she turned and yelled, “Boomer! Boomer! Come out and talk to me!”

“I told you,” Derek laughed as her words echoed down the hillside. “He’s deaf.”

She gave Derek an exasperated look and bent down to grasp a sprig of the plant.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“You may believe in folklore. I do not. I want to have this plant identified by an expert.”

“I’m serious. That really is one of the oldest living things on Earth. I wouldn’t take it.”

“You’re not one to talk,” she said as she broke off a few inches of vine. “You murder innocent animals for trophies.”

“I have a covenant with the animals. You haven’t spent enough time in the wilderness to understand it.”

“I have a master’s degree in electrical engineering, Mister Yeager,” Liu Chen said as she as she tucked the sprig into her collar. “Please don’t tell me what I don’t understand.”

“Fine,” Derek said, walking back to the trail. “Suit yourself.”

When they reached the trail, they took off running uphill again.

“So,” Lulu asked as they ran, “what is the other thing Boomer cares for?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“Why not now?”

“You’re too smart for me, Lulu.”

They stopped at the clearing on the top of Dynamite long enough to look back at the town of New Manor and the Ethan North campus. The spire of the chapel, the roof of Founders Hall, and the crown of the bell tower were below them among the trees. Then Derek led Lulu down the path on the backside of the mountain, which took them to the abandoned farmhouse and down to the covered bridge across Sherman’s Creek.

There was not much traffic on the back road. They walked into the shadows inside the bridge and examined the beams of the ancient structure. The sun shone through the gaps between the barn-board sheathing and illuminated the interior in pinstripes of light.

“Let’s take a break down here,” Derek suggested and led her to the grassy bank under the bridge. They sat against the stone underpinnings of the bridge, and he took apples and bottles of water from his rucksack.

“There are two things I wish to tell you, Derek.”

“Shoot.”

“First, there is … was … a man in my life.”

“Good for you,” Derek bit into his apple.

“Secondly, Jonathan was very happy at Ethan North. He loved the school.”

“Good for him.”

When a car came by, the timbers of the roadway over their heads rattled and rang in succession like the keys of a giant xylophone.

“Now, what brought you to Ethan North, Mister Derek Yeager?”

“Things weren’t so great at home,” Derek shrugged.

“You were happier here?”

“I was. It was like growing up with one hundred and sixty equally screwed-up brothers, Lulu.”

“That’s exactly what Jonathan told me,” she laid back on the grassy bank and ate her apple. “Except that he omitted the screwed-up part.”

Amelia Dupont photo, by permission

The North Atlantic

15 Tuesday Sep 2015

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A brief excerpt from my third novel, ROYALS ALL THE WAY!

They did go below in time to get some sleep, but the wind freshened and the seas picked up during the night. When the steel plates on the deck drains above their berthing area began to slam shut with each wave that slammed into the side of the ship, none of the cadets slept. So Kyle, Melinda and Ben weren’t exactly refreshed when they were roused out of their bunks at zero three thirty hours for the dawn watch.

“Better hang on.” Ben laughed, when the ship felt like a living creature, making random movements under their feet as they dressed.

“This is spooky,” Kyle whispered when they stepped out onto the main deck and looked skyward. The sails and rigging were making giant arcs across the heavens as the ship rolled. Ragged clouds surged past the moon, which backlit the sails in an eerie gray-scale light, like a photographic negative.

The midnight watch had doused and furled the royal sails. When the salt spay came over the rail and wet their cheeks, they raised the hoods of their sweatshirts.

“It’s magnificent,” Melinda mused. The whitecaps caught the silver moonlight as if the sea were a shimmering plateau of sequins, all the way to the horizon.

“I don’t know,” Kyle doubted. “All of a sudden this ship doesn’t look that big.”

They mustered on the sterncastle and stood a trick at the wheel while the summer ensign took bearings on the running lights of passing ships on the distant horizon. There was a long whispered discussion about which lights in the sky were stars and which were planets. And they tried to piece together the constellations in the gaps between the silver-fringed clouds, which seemed to be getting lower as dawn approached.

“That’s Constellation Boeing,” Ben laughed when they all realized that one of the twinkling silver lights they were studying was not a star but a jet airliner, bound for New York or Boston.

The breeze continued to freshen and back to the south, which pushed them northward, towards the high reaches of the North Atlantic where there were icebergs in the springtime. So, in the blue-gray twilight before dawn, their watch was sent aloft to furl the topgallants.

“The wind is really howling up there,” Melinda said with a trace of reluctance.

“It’ll be sporty for sure,” Ben laughed as he scrambled up the ratlines like a hungry spider in his web. “Go large, or stay on deck.”

“You’ll be all right,” Kyle nudged her hip with his own as they started up the rigging behind Ben. “Just stay close to me.”

Ben reached the topgallant first and clambered out to the tip of the spar. Melinda was between the boys, heaving the heavy canvas up while the wind tried to pull it out of their grasp. Kyle was the tallest and strongest, but Ben was wiry and determined, and they all three worked well together.

Just as they finished lashing the sail to the spar, the first rays of the sun came between the horizon and the clouds, making Melinda’s eyes flash green above cheeks which were rosy from the salt air. Kyle raced down the ratlines ahead of the others. But when Melinda reached for the ratlines, Ben tugged on the sleeve of her sweatshirt to hold her back.

“Can you keep a secret?”

Then, without warning, he stole a long first kiss on her lips.

“Ben!” Melinda said as they stepped off the topgallant spar and climbed down the ratlines, side by side. “Never do that again!”

“Never?”

“You couldn’t have picked a more inappropriate moment, Ben. What if Lieutenant Brown saw that?”

“Lieutenant Brown can’t see us up here. When is a better time?”

“Never in public.” She climbed down faster as if she really wanted to get away from him. “And never on the ship!”

“Blame it on the salt air. Melinda.” He kept pace at her side as they neared the deck. “You’ve never looked more beautiful.”

“You’re awful, Bennett Laird.”

Billy Coates

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

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Billy Coates

“Are you for the war,” was the question in 1969, “or against it?”

“I’m not for the war or against it,” Billy Coates would say. “I was in it.”

Now, Billy Coates is a fictional character, and not based on any one person. But I knew from the onset that the protagonist of Flight From Katama, which plays off pivotal events in 1969, would have to be a Vietnam veteran. The reason why has a lot to do with where I was living in the Seventies; Narragansett, Falmouth, Plymouth and Newport. Small seaside towns with a purpose, be it fishing or tourism or sailing. Towns where people were working hard. So the veterans therein (who were all older than myself) had simply come home and gone back to their labors. Perhaps in other places they might have donned their old fatigues and smoked pot and flashed peace signs to air the pain of blood spilled in vain, but the men that I knew had no time for all that.

So in Falmouth we have ex-door gunner Billy Coates, who used his GI Bill benefits to learn to fly, and who then found a wealthy sponsor for his charter flying business. He literally rubs elbows with the rich and famous when he flies them around Cape Cod and the Islands in his airplane, but he is not one of them. His best friend Ned Rogers is a cook in a seafood restaurant and Benedita Lopes, the high school girl whom he never quite connected with, is keeping the Cranberry Flying Service’s books for his silent partner.

When a seemingly small midnight favor — the flight from Katama — evolves into a momentous event, Billy finds himself standing at the confluence of wealth and politics. If he allows himself to be dawn into the media storm, his fifteen minutes of fame might lead to sudden riches. But at what cost to the course which he has charted for his own life?