© TWIDDERDEEN
By the ®Wicked Mind's eye of Captain don/
June 25th 1960
Aruba Island Caribbean
1960
"May I come aboard?" The accent was Dutch and rather strong.
I looked up to see the big cop that I recalled from the day we put Washington in jail. "Of course," I said moving to the railing to give him a hand. He had brought a wooden whisky box with him that he pushed up onto the deck. "Nel left this at the station for you, said something about your needing a replacement for that Panamanian you, ah, lost."
I glanced at the box, figured it would wait and invited him below for coffee. His attention was quickly on his feet as he looked down and saw that he was standing in about a half inch of water. "What's this?" he asked, seeming concerned. I told him that I was cleaning the bilges. The last thing the island wanted was a boat sinking at their town pier. I knew this officer as big Mike, a decent guy and a good cop, I thought, and I generally liked him. He had been on duty the day the police had jailed Washington Spencer Jones, the Panamanian, my worst enemy, the guy who robbed me blind and wanted to kill me.
All of Big Mike’s politeness and smiles didn't change the fact that he had come to tell me that if I wished to continue my stay in Aruba, I had to have proper working papers. "That's the way it has to be," he said. Papers aren't complicated to get, and with all the friends that I'd already made, he saw no problem. "But get your request in now," he warned, "and get off island while they’re being processed." On the way out, he nudged the whisky box with his toe saying, "Take care, he's a good sailor, I'm told." Mike smiled and crossed the dock to his Jeep.
We had been in Aruba, a neat little Dutch island just off the cap of South America, moored at a pier that was almost in the center of town. This was same pier that the floating Bali Restaurant was on. I had struck up a warm acquaintance with the owner, Bill Strighland, who had suggested that if I happened to be out sailing around one day, say in the neighborhood of Columbia or Venezuela, I might pick him up a basket of shrimp. He told me his restaurant always needed jumbo shrimp, and he gave me thirty-five dollars to cover costs. What a nice little outing that could be, fetching a basket of jumbo shrimp. Thirty-five dollars to cover the cost, and my request for a work permit was in the gristmill. I loved it.
Punta Fijo was our target port, just the place to start looking for large jumbo shrimp. Bill and his wife Barbara threw a 'bon voyage' party for me that was the party of all parties, and that's saying a lot for Aruba. Everybody knew that the new Schooner Captain on the block just loved parties, and it was said that I was a party looking for a place to happen anyway.
We cleared port that afternoon and sailed south early the next morning. There were just the three of us on board: myself, Percy (my new found friend of the previous week who traded his bicycle for a berth on the famous Valerie Queen), and the whisky box that I had come to know as the replacement for Washington Spencer Jones, the true son of a whore. After big Mike had left, I had taken a screwdriver to the top of the box and just as I lifted the lid a black lightning bolt jumped out, streaking up the deck to disappear into the forward cuddy.
An hour out the sea started making up, and it was then that I paid my dues for the bon voyage party. I was one sick puppy dog, ready for death. It really wasn't fair at all; I had just started acquiring the taste for Scotch whisky and it crept up on me. That's all they ever drank on that island of Aruba. I just needed more practice.
I was of zero value for anything and left the steering of the ship to Percy. He was new and needed to be tested. He tried, but he liked that down hill, flat deck stuff. I had pointed the ship in the right direction, trimmed the sails, put the wheel in his hand, then tapped the compass telling him to keep it there. Considering everything, he did a pretty good job. Then his navigation went to hell, and he sailed us right off the edge of Columbus’s flat world.
When my stomach returned and the hangovers pulled back into their shells, I finally found my sea legs and took charge again. Percy excused the course change, telling me that the compass had somehow broken.
About then I thought it time for a talk with god, and went to the base of the main mast, placing my hand fondly on the old tree, a strong feeling of nostalgia washing over me. However, in truth, the mast mostly supported my limp and bilious body. I softly stroked the coarseness, the very heart of a tree that had gone into making the mast. The Queen was a tender and understanding thing with new foundlings and stupid sailors. Hadn't she been so with me? I silently thanked her for that.
We had been running with short canvas, a couple of double reefs tied here and there. Yet we still gobbled up the distance surprisingly fast.
It was easily understandable why Percy had allowed the ship to run. It gave a relatively flat deck and was a comfortable way to go when the sea was lumpy and uncertain, such as it was now. Actually, the sea was a mess. To watch a wave was to defy a guess of its direction. As the arrival of my sea legs always seemed to coincide with landfalls, I was just starting to get a grip on my stomach, which I thought had gone overboard during the night. As I moved about doing chores, I felt as if I were being watched, one of those feelings that one can't explain. Then as if by a seventh sense, I turned slowly and looked forward. At the base of the anchor windlass sat a cat, body rolling slowly with the motion of the ship. The mast forgotten, I put my full attention to the animal. I had almost forgotten about Washington Spencer Jones' replacement. So black, when it closed its eye I could hardly see the cat against the black of the windlass. What a marvelous piece of engineering that beast was. I wondered how he would fare aboard the Queen, then returned to the work always waiting to be done. All in all, though requiring the usual maintenance of a wooden ship, the Queen was a very uncomplicated vessel, tall and long, with no electricity, windlass or reliable engine. Aboard her we lived simply from canned food and crushed our own coffee and cocoa beans by wrapping them up in a pair of oily jockey shorts and beating them with the flat of a hammer. Percy objected, but had no better idea.
We fumbled around in the heavy seas for the rest of the night, Percy limping up and down the deck after bruising his foot on a cleat. He sang constantly, searching for the words or simply screaming "Concho" into the black night. I was sitting in gloom while my lovely ship bobbed up and down, waiting an order to get underway. We remained hove to, waiting for the dawn, which left me time to think about Bernie and her wonderful gourds.
A line on the dawn horizon was rapidly approaching, showing us the first sign of land. It bore hard off the port bow, materializing quickly as landfalls do in the tropics when the haze is holding low. At first light we scanned the horizon for signs of the port. The green lumpy seas of the night before had thankfully raced away to bother some other shore. To the south lay coastland, stretching out in either direction forever, and now it was my job to find Punta Fijo. Exactly where we were was still to remain a surprise, but I strongly suspected we were looking at real estate belonging to Venezuela, although I also guessed that we were very close to the border of Colombia. My charts and several tosses of the coin decided exactly where we were. No way could it be Colombia. Besides, I knew the Colombian coast pretty well. What I was looking at was a strange piece of real estate. Ah, what matter anyway? Land is land, sea is sea, and where they come together is called coast.
I put my attention forward, not expecting to see the cat there again after the wild night, but surprise, there was the black cat gnawing on a flying fish that must have come aboard during the storm. "Well," I thought, "that's one belly easy to feed." I fetched the binoculars and put them on the cat. I saw it was male, torn up a bit with the left eye missing, all in all looking big and mean.
I was instantly swept with nostalgia, with the cat still looming large in my lenses. I visualized campfires burning low, bad singing, a dry place under a bridge, a true hobo camp, and a pure black one-eyed Tom the tramps called Twidderdeen. God, how could I have remembered that? I laughed, recalling how the cat used to dribble when I petted it on my lap and asked out loud, "Hey, cat, do you dribble?" Then added, "Twidderdeen."
If my thinking had been in order, we would have started backtracking immediately, but I had a yen for holing up to lick our wounds, so to speak. Percy had really put us off course and down wind, meaning we had to beat our way back up the coast into the eye of the wind. As lovely as the Queen was, she was the wettest hull ever to come out of a shipyard. Give her a ten foot sea and four feet of it was coming down the decks.
Twidderdeen had come up from the focsle to catch some sun, and nestled himself in a coil of rope as I was squaring away the halyards on the foremast only twelve feet or so from him. I watched him with interest, marveling at nature's ways of survival. The animal should have spent its ninth life years ago. The glasses lay near and I fetched them to have a closer look. Twidderdeen raised his head, looking portrait fashion directly into my vision. The wound where his left eye had been was clean and healing nicely; I marveled again at nature's ways. The starboard eye watched me unabashed, unafraid, and almost defiant. I had never been a cat fancier, yet I admired this animal more than many people I had known. He could teach people something if we were only to listen. His berth on my Queen was secure, and I wondered how I could tell him.
Percy had come to stand by me, silent and watching, "Boy! That's sure some cat. Got hopi webo's!"
"Hopi webo's?" I asked, knowing that I was to learn some more Papiamentu. "Webo's" were eggs, as any good Spaniard knew, but what the hell was "hopi?" I asked him.
"Hopi is much, how you say, plenty, yeah, plenty."
End part one of two
Part two dedicated to Barbel who's cat is on the roam. It was male yes?
Twidderdeen
Part two of two
Okay, I thought, plenty eggs. And I looked at Twidderdeen half expecting him to have turned into a bird, then brought up the glasses again to have another look. "Plenty eggs?" And I looked at Percy who was still studying the cat.
Without taking his eyes off Twidderdeen, he simply replied, "Yeah, plenty balls." Percy was acting very strangely. He placed his hand on his left shoulder and watched the cat. I watched Percy for a moment, then looked down the deck at Twidderdeen and noticed how he had commenced licking his left shoulder. Then Percy placed his hand on his chest and intently watched the cat. I jerked my head in the direction of the cat, and I'll be godarned if the shoulder licking didn’t stop and he started licking his chest.
Nothing aboard the Queen ever startled me, the ship often seeming alive. Percy's strange communications with the big four-bore Hall Scott had been evident, and now he was communicating with Twidderdeen by mental telepathy. That in itself wasn’t as strange as the fact that he seemed to have total control over the animal.
I started to chuckle, "Awwww sheeut," and broke into roaring laughter. Twidderdeen quickly looked up, then sprang for the forepeak cuddy.
After some hours of coasting east, we raised a small fishing village, a scattering of rough huts, filthy and primitive. We could almost hear the drone of flies and smell the rotting fish, so we continued east, slamming every wave flat, and in time raised the entrance of Punta Fijo.
With the engine struggling and coughing at every turn, we headed on into the harbor's channel. Percy leaned into the shrouds at my side. "Deep sea diver, what you think we go treasure hunting instead of finding them shrimp?"
That took me aback a little, and I looked at him and smiled, "I've already been there a bunch of times, Percy. Yes, a bunch."
He looked at me and asked, "Is that where you got the money to buy this boat?"
I couldn't help but laugh. "No, you damn fool. I had to have the boat first to hunt for the treasure. Besides, I already told you all about that." Then watching him closely, added, "We got thirty five dollars of Bill's money, remember? Now just what kind of pirates do you think we are anyway?" And I glanced forward at Twidderdeen comfortably sacked out in a fold of a sail, perhaps dreaming of adventure, just like his shipmates.
- 79 -
After words. May, 1999.
One day, not so long ago, I found myself overwhelmed with nostalgia at my memories of this wild, sleek black cat, Twidderdeen. I was at Bonaire’s animal shelter, a delightful place that had been built with the efforts of many caring people.
In my wanderings over the grounds, I found myself at the threshold of a high cielinged wire cage, one which seemed to have been more a place for monkeys rather than a strange blend of cats. Then I saw it, way in the far reaches of the cage, a medium sized black cat squeezed into a corner as if defending his domain. It brought back sharp memories of the 30's at a Hobo camp down by the tracks, and of my own Valerie Queen during the 60’s, and I couldn't help but wonder if this black cat drooled.
Irene, the attendant, brought the cat to the door of the cage. My heart took a leap and I called aloud, "Twidderdeen."
Irene stepped back, her Dutch shifting gears, brows coming down and said, " What?"
I knew that this cat was a wild thing, and I just had to have it. I paid twenty dollars for that black pussycat. Then I told Irene that there had been other black cats in my past. However, each had had only one eye, and I asked directions to the vet's to have one of the cat's eyes removed, the left eye to be exact.
Iran’s eyes grew big and round and some guttural sounds came from somewhere deep in her chest. Twidderdeen, now secure in a small cage, let out a howl as if he understood and rattled the cage in protest. I replied, "Hey, if scraping the eye out disturbs you, well, I'll just glue it shut with super glue, or how about an eye patch?" Irene finally smiled, remembering my sometimes warped sense of humor, and Twidderdeen III viewed his new home with both eyes working. He looked at the two dogs who were appraising him, then put his attention to one big, mean, orange mamma cat that was pushing her face up against the wire of his cage, first snarling then letting out a horrible scream that all but took the hair off Twidderdeen’s back.
It was my every intention that Twidderdeen was to become part of our Garden Nursery, something to remind me of my years at sea aboard my wonderful Schooner the Valerie Queen. However, the idea wasn't working at all. Jealousy reigned over the farm and poor Twidderdeen was openly rejected.
Several days went by and we hadn't seen Twidderdeen, but we sensed he was living somewhere out in the woods which surrounded our property. Janni was frantic; I was more nonchalant, knowing that cats, particularly black Toms, have their own ways and that worrying was just wasted time.
Then, on the third evening, Twidderdeen showed up in the pussycat chow line which Janni ran every sunset on the roof of our sitting porch, which the cats could reach but the dogs could not. I saw that Twidderdeen was not popular. I was hoping it wasn't a color thing. But nonetheless, here was one starving black pussycat that was staking territory here and now in Janni's midnight mission. When full, he looked at me, then Janni, leaped to the low branches surrounding the porch, then like Tarzan disappeared off and into the wild. I wondered if he had a grudge about the eye joke.
Janni, near tears, was wringing her hands and pacing the floor, worrying about that damned cat. "Ah, Don, where will that poor kitty cat sleep?" My reply that Twidderdeen II had favored a breezy fold in the staysail, and Twidderdeen I the bed roll of a Hobo, and as for Twidderdeen III we'd just have to see, didn't go over very well. Then several hours later Janni returned to the house, shaking with excitement, exclaimed that she had found my black cat and that I had better come quickly and see.
It was something all right. Twidderdeen had found his way into the chicken coop, past all the doors and all the locks to be amongst some thirty-five sleeping chickens, many of whom were secure in their nesting boxes. There, second tier up in a center box, was Twidderdeen III, curled up and obviously sound asleep. I had to think about that for a while, then decided that Twidderdeen simply thought himself a chicken.
kla
End part two of two.
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By Freddie {Moderator} (Moderator - Post #646) on Sunday, September 28, 2008 - 12:57 pm: 
