THE BUNNY

BUNNY RUN

I needed a drink, something stronger than his rubbery ethics had allowed on board. He was gone anyway, probably back with his carping wife by now. Good for him. Maybe she had missed him.

Something like scotch or vodka, but not that rotgut Southern Comfort. With lots of ice, for sure, and maybe a burger. I couldn’t look at his watery beer any more much less drink it.

And I needed help. If I didn’t get help I’d be stuck here, not that it was a bad place to be stuck. I’ll bet a lot of people were stuck here. This was, after all, the bar at the end of the road, fin du terre.

“Scotch, make it a double and expensive,” I said. I looked at my bruised legs and ragged sneakers.

“Just get in?” replied the bartender, nursing a toothpick in one side of his mouth and a cigarette in the other. He rag-polished the bar and set the icy glass down, the sides already glistening from the humidity. I nodded yes and knocked the scotch back in three gulps. I needed a lot more of those.

“Passing through?” He looked me over. I needed a haircut although I had been shaving, but I knew I looked rough.

“Yeah, if I can find some help.” And a hotel room would be good, too, I thought. With all the hot water I wanted. That would be a start.

“How far you going?” He dunk-washed some glasses and smoked. A good question, probably gone too far already. But it was too late for second thoughts.

“Spain.”

“Help that good is a little scarce around here, with the hurricanes and all. How did you get this far?”

“Doesn’t matter, he’s back with his wife and dog, safe and warm.”

“Too bad. How long you here?” The bartender was empathetic, he sensed my urgency. Winter was coming—something not even good luck could get me through.

“I need to get moving, summer’s going to end. Gets cold in Spain fast.”

“Can you teach someone? No savvy help around here now.”

For the first time he looked me in the eye. His forearms were like clubs, beefy with some faded tattoos hiding under bushy arm hair.

“Yeah, it’s mostly driving work and some cooking.” If it was so simple why did I look so tired?

“You might have to hire a bunny.” He looked away and stacked some glasses. I looked at him; he handed me another scotch.

“A girl,” he explained. “That’s what’s left around here. The guys are making fortunes repairing roofs.” I must have appeared simultaneously speechless and forlorn. A girl, for God’s sake. My track record with women was not lustrous.

“There’s one over there.” He nose-pointed to a tired-looking teenager with ratty hair slumped in a booth fiddling with a cell phone. Three empty beer cans rested in front of her. Their sides were dry; she had been here for awhile.

“She showed up this morning, probably got dumped by some asshole. She needs a job and a place to stay. You can start by paying her bar bill.” He motioned to her to come to the bar. She lowered her head, slid off the booth’s bench seat. She slowly walked over and sat next to me on a bar stool. There were tiny wrinkles behind her eyes. This girl had put some miles behind her. This was no teenager.

“What?” she asked the bartender and swiveled to face him. Her voice was clear and free of an accent. She was overweight and the extra pounds gave her a puffy appearance as if she had been insulated for cold weather.

“This guy has a job for you. He’ll buy you a drink and tell you all about it.” He poured her a scotch and went down to the other end of the bar. She looked at me with pink rimmed green eyes. Her shirt had a food stain. A little diamond was somehow attached to the side of her oily nose. Her ears had been pieced but the jewelry was missing.

“Job?”

“Two months, one hundred dollars a day.” I figured six thousand dollars would get her attention. “I’m taking my sailboat to Spain and I need help with steering and deck watches. Food and clothes are included. Can you swim?”

“I can swim,” she laughed. “Are you gonna toss me overboard?”

“No, but it’s one less thing to worry about. Can you cook?” The bartender returned to the conversation. She looked at him, motioned that she wanted another drink and went to the bathroom. He waited until she was out of sight.

“Don’t push your luck with that cooking crap. Bunnies are content-free. They can’t cook, fix cars, or type. Now she’s twenty-something years old and drifting because she never picked up any skills. There’s nothing inside—nothing has stuck to them. You show her what to do, that’s it,” he implored me. I couldn’t imagine her as a void.

He pushed another scotch in front of me and coldly said, “Never leave a bunny alone and never get a bunny pregnant, remember that.”

I would have considered his monologue whiskey-talk, but he wasn’t drinking. Leaving her alone wasn’t difficult, the sailboat almost defined incarceration and a urologist had zeroed the sperm count a decade ago, not that sex was part of the deal. God knew what organisms resided in her. Bunnies weren’t necessarily glamorous, I noted.

“Is there a bar on this boat?” she asked, returning to her fresh scotch. I waited for her to light a cigarette which would have been a deal-breaker. No cigarette came out of the woven handbag. Maybe she couldn’t afford them.

“Yes, two cases of good scotch and vodka plus a bunch of sodas and juices. The food is mostly TV dinners and canned stuff. No TV, but a lot of old movies on tapes. No drinking when you’re working.”

“When do I get paid, when we get to Spain? And is it just us? And is it cash?”

“Just us. Your bedroom is up front and mine’s in back. You even get your own bathroom. We stop in Bermuda, the Azores, and then Marbella. We have to get there before winter hits. We work four on, four off, share cooking and cleaning. You get cash in Spain.”

“You look old enough to be my Dad, maybe my Grandpa. Why are you alone, what’s wrong with you? Are you a yeller or a hitter?”

“A lot’s wrong with me,” I countered, somewhat surprised with her confidence in the face of destitution. “It takes a nut case to sail to Europe in the first place but I wanted to do it before it’s too late. I don’t yell and I don’t hit. This is a job, not a date. You get all the way to Spain, you get a thousand dollar bonus.”

I gave the bartender a hundred dollar tip. We cabbed around to several small stores, loaded up with booze, food and clothes she liked and cast off from Key West. We hardly said a word to each other.

Sailing the boat was no problem for her. She intuitively adapted to boat life, and I stopped auditing her sailing after three days. The worn-out blue jeans had been replaced with her new Key West clothes and sunglasses. She looked like a sailboat calendar picture in the yellow yachtsman’s rain jacket. She said she looked forward to seeing Bermuda. Me too, I said. She didn’t complain when the first squall line hit the boat covering us in stinging rain and causing both of us to become seasick and soggy aping around on the slippery foredeck.

“How do you know where we are?” She came down to the little map desk next to my bedroom after the weather had cleared. The boat autopiloted across a glassy, dark blue expanse. I showed her the satellite position readout and pointed to the map coordinates.

“What if you die or get sick and the satellite breaks? How do I get to Bermuda?” I showed her the sextant on the shelf and explained you can take sun and star readings and translate them to our position using the books on the shelf.

“Show me how to use it.” We divided our day into navigation lessons, which she quickly absorbed, steering, eating and drinking. By the time we reached Bermuda, she could read the satellite-delivered weather maps and take sun sights. Star sights took longer to learn, but she was getting better at them. The previous boat owner left behind five books on sailing and navigation. Halfway to Bermuda she had read most of them. I was spending more time relaxing and drinking. The bunny ruled the ship. So much for rule number one. I wondered if I would ever see that bartender again.

“Hey! You have got to fix this shitty autopilot!” She yelled from the steering wheel position while I was in the bathroom. I had never heard her yell much less complain. Serenity vanished: steering was unwelcome labor.

Our mechanical crew member was ill. Sailboats are guileless victims to capricious winds and turbulent waves constantly forcing tiny and major helm adjustments. Manually steering a big boat will tire an ardent helmsman in about two hours. Our autopilot shipmate was dying. We needed it to work, almost desperately.

“Look, it just unhooks the rudder when it goddamn feels like it and the goddamn boom almost took my head off before I snubbed it.” She had stopped trusting the autopilot and resorted to hand steering. The Atlantic was in a rolling mood with a flat gray sky, encouraging my constantly verging seasickness. The autopilot modules hid under the deck above the catch-all bilge where diesel fuel, old vomit, and shampoo suds sloshed before the scavenger pump eventually cast the bile overboard.

I had to enter the vertiginous cave, tear out the diseased autopilot and repair it. I was nauseous just thinking about it. Six hours later, I repaired the problem. I had thrown up twice, cut my fingers and was filthy, but the autopilot resumed its patient toil. I took a long shower with our precious fresh water and climbed in bed.

She worked two shifts and let me sleep. When I awoke, she brought me breakfast--scrambled eggs and sausage on a microwave-hot plastic tray. After I finished eating she put the tray on the floor and climbed into bed with me holding half a bottle of vodka. She motioned me to be quiet and unbuttoned my shirt. She then pulled her sweatshirt off exposing her upper body and arms. I had not realized how tanned her arms and face had become. Quietly and efficiently she made love to me. After we finished she lay next to me for awhile and then went back to the steering position on the upper deck leaving the vodka with me. Neither of us said a word. When I came back from my shift, she had moved into my bedroom. There had been no discussion.

Seven weeks elapsed, we tied the salt-crusted, ocean-weary boat to a transient dock in Marbella, Spain. I found a first class restaurant and we ate, almost wordlessly, exquisitely fresh food. I watched her, dressed in her newest jeans and white tee shirt, her now-longer hair tied back in a pony tail. The diamond nose jewel was missing and the puffiness was almost gone. Her eyes were clear and white, I noticed.

“Thanks for the money,” she said.

“Thanks for the help,” I said. She finished her wine, kissed me on the lips and left with her yellow duffle bag over her shoulder. My bunny was gone. I had violated all the bunny rules. My bunny was now a lean, competent sailor. I had loaded content in her, and she was walking away from me, alone. Never leave your bunny alone.

I needed a drink. And I needed some help.