Everything reminds me of something.

I was delivering a newly minted Beechcraft Debonair, a lovely 4-seat, single-engine retractable like its sister the Bonanza, but with a vertical rudder instead of a V tail. The Deb is a sturdy bird with the same landing gear they hang on their twin-engine, much heavier Baron; so it can be flown into and out of the roughest damned fields in Texas.

I was coming from the Beech factory in Wichita, Kansas, heading back to Oregon. But one of those northwestern hurricanes or Williwaws covered everything west of Wyoming with ice, hail and freezing rain. So I opted for the southern route.

After landing in Waco to top off the tanks and visit a pal, I sat in the rough pilot’s lounge drinking coffee and shooting the breeze with him.

Lying there on the coffee table among the flying magazines was a “Wanted” flyer. It had a photo on it of a man in his mid-fifties wearing golfing togs, maybe a businessman on his day off. He had been on a flight from St. Louis to L.A. in a powder blue, two-year-old Beechcraft; he’d been missing for almost a year.

It was pure coincidence that both the Missing Man and I were flying the same type of aircraft (except that mine was new). I scratched my head and recalled how often I’d wanted to ditch my responsibilities and simply disappear; god knows I was in debt up to here and in spite of working my ass off, I’d been tapping my nest egg every damned month that year (I”d had a drawer filled with E-Series savings bonds when I left the service, but they wouldn’t last long at the rate my wife was spending money). I longed to get off of that treadmill. So I was thinking about the missing man when I landed at Gila Bend, Arizona and parked my plane beside a powder blue Debonair.

I had to wait my turn to use the phone to call the FSS to check the weather. The guy using the phone was the Missing Man.

The Missing Man looked younger than the guy in the flyer, so I assumed he’d been enjoying his life on the run. The reward offered for information by his wife, who probably was more concerned about collecting his life insurance than getting him back wasn’t enough to blow his cover.

Setting the Anchor

One of his more embarrassing moments: He drops the hook and watches the chain and line pay out, while his mind is on the naked nymph poised on the lazaretto preparing to dive into the crystalline water of the lagoon and noting those firm buttocks and a deep dimple above each, and then turning back to his business just in time to see that the bitter end of the anchor rope isn’t tied to the cleat. Down goes the line and anchor into the deep lagoon and the boat is beginning to drift astern due to the rapidly ebbing tide towards the girl frolicking in the water.

If the 40-foot ketch, drifting at only one knot, should strike her head, it could brain her. If it doesn’t kill her instantly she’ll probably drown before the idiot who forgot to tie the anchor line to the cleat can run that far, dodging the stays, the booms and the clutter in the cockpit to throw her a life preserver or even shout a warning. Now a gust of offshore wind riffles the surface as it moves toward the boat. At the top of his lungs he screams: HELP!

The girl turns, expecting to see her companion is some sort of trouble, sees the hull bearing down on her. She surface dives and swims deep. She sees the barnacle-encrusted keel pass over her with a meter of clearance. She swims up to grasp the chain stays of the bowsprit and climbs back aboard. She watches her lover as he leans over the lifeline at the stern, but says nothing.

She opens the hatch to the chain locker, removes the spare anchor, checks its shackle is secured, ties the bitter end of the line to the deck cleat and heaves the anchor overboard.

The flukes of the spare anchor hook a coral head and when the line has paid out, the boat comes to an instant halt. The idiot leaning over the stern is thrown into the water. She ambles aft like an apparition to laugh at the fool.