Hurricane Fever Read Free

He’d gotten a deal on the motorboat and gotten it to Red Hook. Limping in on faulty machinery and fumes from the Bahamas. He’d anchored the damn thing, and it’d been sitting in the harbor through two hurricane seasons. And Tinker had become a fixture at the bar. Another piece of human driftwood tossed up here in St. Thomas.
    Tinker was working on converting the engines to take leftover oil from fryers. He had tanks of the shit fastened to his decks, collected from restaurants all around Red Hook. Every once in a while the engines would chug and belch out the smell of grease and fried food all over the harbor. And then they’d fall silent.
    “No,” Tinker looked down. “Not this storm.” He’d have to shelter on land at a friend’s, wondering yet again if his home would be there in the morning. Or whether he’d find it dashed up against the shore somewhere.
    “Sorry to hear it,” Roo said, genuinely. He nodded at Seneca. “Tinker’s next; on my tab, yeah?”
    She nodded.
    “Thanks, Roo. Another beer, Seneca.” Tinker tapped the counter. “Storm shouldn’t be too bad, right? Sixty-five miles an hour, they’re saying. Was thinking I might ride it out.”
    Roo looked at the harbor, open to the ocean. St. John’s hills in the distance. A green ferry cut through the rolling waves, chugging its way over to the other island with a load of cars and people. “You don’t want to do that, Tinker.”
    Tinker shrugged. “Got a lot of chain laid down for my anchor.”
    “Let the ship ride by herself,” Roo counseled.
    “Maybe,” Tinker said. “And afterwards, I’m going to try and get south for the season. Maybe I’ll see you in the Grenadines for once.”
    Roo smiled at Tinker’s perennial optimism. “I’ll buy you drinks for a full week if I see you in Bequia,” he said with a smile, knowing full well he was never going to have to pay out on that bet.
    Tinker raised his beer happily, Roo raised his glass, and they tinked them together.
    “How’s Delroy?” Tinker asked. “He putting you in the bar today?”
    Roo shook his head. “Just a long day prepping my boat. Delroy’s okay.” He glanced at the wooden-rimmed clock over the multicolored bottles in the back of the bar. Okay, but late again.
    It would be tempting to go walk toward school to find him. But Roo killed that impulse. Delroy was almost ready to graduate. Nothing much he could do if the boy was ready for trouble.
    And he’d kept out of trouble the last couple years well enough.
    Roo had drifted away from the islands. Been recruited away from them and into to a different life. He’d had nothing to hold him down back then. No one but a brother who, understandably to Roo now, didn’t want to have anything to do with him.
    When Roo came back to the Virgin Islands, he found not only the buildings changed, the people he’d known gone or moved on to other things, but found his brother had died. His wife as well.
    Roo found his nephew Delroy stuck with a foster family doing their best. But Delroy was twisted up with anger and loneliness that they couldn’t handle. He’d been throwing in with a crowd as angry as he was, looking to define himself with trouble.
    So Roo picked him up.
    There wasn’t much trouble Delroy could imagine or cause that Roo hadn’t seen. And Roo needed a hobby in his new retirement.
    He had made Delroy his hobby.
    New school, new life. New family.
    Delroy didn’t turn into a scholar. But he calmed down.
    Roo set his empty glass on the bar. “Tinker, you give Delroy a ride out when he gets here? He let his cell phone go dead again. Or left it in his room again.”
    “Yeah, man.”
    *   *   *
    Roo soaked up the sun as he hopped into a fifteen-foot-long semirigid inflatable dinghy. He untied from a cleat with a quick half flip of a wrist and tossed the painter down into the fiberglass bottom, then flicked the electric engine on.
    Most of the boats with people living aboard them here in the harbor had