Show Me the Body

Before today I have always imagined being on a yacht like this, sunbathing without a care in the world as the pinnacle of success. Am I in control of my destiny? It’s hard to think of anything that could break this euphoria, but am I really in control of my destiny?

 At my age, ha, this isn’t my boat. I haven’t worked for any of this, but I imagine one day this exquisite boat could me mine, or ours, as in mine and Wayne’s. One wonders, thus far the mileage on my life is all of thirty two years, still very low. What will it take for this to be mine?

I assume it’s around 3 pm. The heat isn’t terrible, and I’m cautiously covered in a thin layer of sunscreen, basking in the delightful rays of a soothing and heavenly light, now interrupted by a robust argument inside the wheelhouse. I’ve chosen to ignore it, but it gets louder and louder, and a ruckus now indicates there is a full-blown physical altercation I can’t ignore.

Racing to get there, I quickly push the door in to find my brother’s-in-law William Jr., Prince, Wyatt, Sean and my husband Wayne standing next to each other, short of breath and almost falling over from exhaustion. To my dismay, my father-in-law, William Rochester Sr.^, has been tied to the captain’s chair and is struggling to break free!

Now if it was just my imagination I would’ve seen them all laughing, dismissing the affair as some weird family tradition they didn’t tell me about…but they’re not laughing. My father-in-law is in a real hot temper, and at the moment I assume I am to be the only one in here concerned about the condition of his poor old heart.

I asked Wayne, “Whoa…what’s going on here?” It seems embarrassment has halted a dynamic family feud which could have ended worse than this. The owner of the yacht doesn’t take physical contact like this lightly, regardless of who instigates it.

For a red-headed old man with an impressive bushy beard and semi-bald head, William Sr. could once command all five of his sons with only a glare from the green, raging eyes of a lion. Fear of him reeks from the inside of their bones to the sweat of their brows and armpits, and there is nervousness in their eyes that they actually pulled this off unscathed. How will they undo it without consequences?

My concern is can he actually muster enough strength the break free? He is secured to the chair with half an inch thickness in rope. Is it tied properly? I’m sure he is wiggling enough to find weaknesses in it. 

No, there’s no getting away. He is hog tied first and secured to the chair; a king is secured to his throne.

There might be a safe spot in the wheelhouse to help mediate and mitigate this, it’s in the corner behind William Sr., a comfortable distance about five giant steps behind the captain’s chair. The exit is within arm’s reach. I might inch towards it to go back out since no one is answering me yet, and it gets worse. Prince begins threatening his father, “Tell us who it is or we’ll throw you overboard, it’s easy,” he says, and his brothers are happy to concur, nodding in agreement.

 Cynically I asked Wayne and the others, “Is there strength in unity in the wild savannah?” staring in disbelief at five male lion cubs out of their depth of ocean, and worse, they should know this.

I met William Sr. when I became his corporate attorney. That’s how I met and married Wayne. Am I the only one in the room who knows that my father-in-law is a billionaire? Based on the look of things—

In retaliation, the grumpy old man summons a ball of saliva from the bowels of his throat and like a canon, shoots it onto Princes shoe, “Go ahead,” he says, summons another, and with impeccable marksmanship lands that one onto Wayne’s shoe. Un-evadable, rapid-fire retribution has begun. 

The old man tries for a third when his snort is interrupted by his eldest, William Jr., who is next in line, “Dad, don’t you dare! We just want to talk to—“

Wyatt and Sean escape their share of it, launching into the safe zone behind the captain’s chair to stand on either side of me. How primitive are their brains, really? For grown men set to inherit an empire they’ve been on this boat more times than I have and were the ones who fasten his seatbelt, his chair swivels, and he spins slowly to face all three of us.

I guess the old man doesn’t want to insult me too much, he chooses not to deliver his uncouth judgment in case his aim is off next time around.

William Rochester is also the name of the yacht. Being tossed overboard by his own flesh and blood wouldn’t be the way the old man would want to go out, but he’d do so satisfyingly taking one or more of them with him.

Wyatt tries to garner support from his brothers for a different approach, saying, “Dad we only want to talk. We’re not trying to hurt you.”

Prince grumbles in disagreement, “Uh huh,”, and looks down at his spitted shoe.

For some reason this experience is earning William Rochester Sr. a lot more respect from me, despite his uncultured behavior. Two years ago he walked me through one of his warehouses. None of his boys know about this.

***

 There were no windows. He switched the tube lights on when he and I entered through giant barn doors. The lights came on one at a time until I was able to grasp the vastness of his empire when the last light at the end of the warehouse buzzed to life. He walked me to the end of the massive compound, one of many, stepping over lumbers and planks of wood along the way.

 It took a good minute. I sneezed mercilessly due to the musty presence of rats, and the mold of old damp, exotic wood competing for dominance in the semi-underground complex. With each step I watched the aged man with his arms folded behind his back. He hunched forward. Two of his fingers were missing, from the DIP joints of the index and middle fingers of his right hand to their respective non-existent fingertips.

At the end of our journey lied a coffin of wonderful craftsmanship. The old man beamed with pride describing how long it took him to make it by hand. The coffin gleamed like a pearl, only this pearl had been carved from some of the finest century old wood known to man. He pushed it closer to the wall, and brass metal bars bolted on to either side prevented the rough pebble dash texture of the wall from scratching the coffin’s finish. He said he carved and assembled it from cured Lignum Vitae lumber imported from South America.

“That’s my final hoorah. Isn’t it beautiful? What a way to go home in style,” he said, gliding what remained of his fingers along the coffin’s lid. A carpenter’s ending for a carpenter’s remarkable journey, but the high life isn’t always what it appears to be.

***

Here on the yacht the family conference has taken on ire of civility. Tempers have cooled and yet these boys refuse to untie their father.

A little decorum and professionalism thrown into the mix should further cool the atmosphere. I might have to separate them from the old man to get to the solution, so I exert my influence on Wayne, telling him, “Perhaps we all should take a minute. Let’s go to our cabins for now, and you could perhaps take a shower and drink an ice-cold beer,”

Wayne, in return, briefs me on the nature of what I witnessed upon entry, “Well since this is a family affair stick around Felecia,” he says, “There are some important questions Dad needs to answer. For example, we’d like to know who the other partner in the Rochester & Rochester Company is,” Wayne then turns to the old man and asks him, “Dad, we are waiting. Who is it?” he says, and sarcastically smiles.

This is also a moment…for me. I’ve been the old man’s attorney for two years and I’ve never, never asked him that question either. At the moment bashful silence is my friend. The old man is hanging his head in either frustration or shame. He won’t look at me.

Finally Wayne storms out of the wheelhouse enraged. A few seconds later Wyatt follows, and then William Jr., and then Sean and finally, after an intimidating stare-down between father and son, so does Prince.

 Hastening to untie the mutinied captain, I find myself binding him into tighter knots being no match for the roping skills of three hunters and two anglers.

In a gruff voice the old man says, “There is a filleting knife under the captain’s chair,”

 I slip my hand under the chair, slowly since I can’t know which way the blade points, and sure enough, immediately grasp not only its handle but also the gravity of what could’ve unfolded earlier.

With the rope cut the old man remains seated in bewilderment, leaning to the side, tired.

When I ask him if anything like this ever happened before he says with a sigh, “No, it happened because I’m old and dying.”

His lips are cracked, his yellow Polo shirt soaked with perspiration. I grab him a bottle of water from the captain’s fridge and open it for him. His hands shake a quarter of the contents out of the bottle, so I take the bottle back to help him take a few sips, “What do you mean by old and dying Dad?” I ask.

He chuckles and asks, “Shouldn’t you be having a talk with your husband about what just happened here?”

 I really should find Wayne to ask him about the incident. It is also undeniable that the truth about why it happened resides with the old man and no one else. At the moment something he said has me intrigued, I ask him again, “What do you mean by old and dying? Dad, you are an old man, yes, but what do you mean by ‘dying?” 

“I have cancer, ok! Doc says I’ve got about a year left, maybe a year and a half,” he still hasn’t looked me in the eye, and there are things yet untold. Dare I ask?

He is sincere. Finally he holds his head up and I struggle to hold back a teary-eyed response when asking him if his children had known any of this when they savagely attacked him. Truth about this will have implications for Wayne and me going forward.

“Yes, they know, but they didn’t attack me. I started this when they asked me about the Company. Don’t be too hard on my boys about this, please,” he says, pinches me on the chin and smiles.

Calmly and sarcastically I asked, “So your children want to know who inherits what, I see. That might be a bit of a problem unless you change the Company’s name from Rochester & Rochester, and put their interests in a trust, Dad. Otherwise, as you can see, they’ll start eating each other,”

For some reason the old man is amused, but in a weird way, almost in tears, and I am now confused. He pulls me in and squeezes me tightly, “It’s not as easy as you make it seem, not that easy at all. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but you are the best thing that has happened to this family, and this company. Never forget that,” he says.

On my way out towards my cabin I keep reflecting on the old man’s words, searching for the best approach to have that necessary conversation with Wayne. My role on this voyage might be more than just moral support for him. They all tied the old lion to his chair in a desperate search for answers. Something else is going on here, no doubt about that!

Upon entering the cabin I see Wayne sitting on the bed, tapping his heel on the floor. His right foot still has the shoe on it. I toss him a bottle of water which he refused to catch. It bounces once on the mattress and rolls to rest beside him.

I ought to have been better prepared for this, unfortunately this is too close to home, and I won’t hold back, “How do you expect to get answers by tying your old, sick father to a chair? Wayne how could you be a part of something like this?” looking back, I think I might have thrown the bottle of water at him, but I won’t apologize.

“So he told you. I take it he also told you where to find my uncle. The one whose name is on the company building,” he says, it seems Wayne was better prepared for me than I was for him. I didn’t know he had an uncle… no he doesn’t!

“You don’t have an uncle,” but if it was a lie he would have blinked already and he hasn’t. I might be better off rephrasing my statement into a question, like, “Why do you believe you have an uncle?”

How thrilled I am to hear that an aunt on Wayne’s mother’s side, Aunt Andrea, told him Dad was sick, and that he, William Sr., has a brother living in Mexico, and that the old man’s company existed before they, the Rochester boys, were born. If that’s true, when the old man dies… well…I should know the rest…but I don’t and I don’t know who I am anymore!

I must yield in consideration of the fact that, in these circumstances, the man I married might be telling the truth. He’s not even ashamed of anything but the old man is ashamed of something.

 I head up to the wheelhouse, hoping to question the old man only to discover the captain is a nimble old goat indeed, he’s gone!

I run in trepidation down the stairs into my cabin to alert Wayne, “Dad’s gone. Help me find him, quick!” and bolt again through the door in a whirlwind.

Wayne runs beside me, bumping into me up the stairs. We end up wedged side-by-side in the entrance of the wheelhouse. Wayne muscles past me. He sees the mangled rope on the floor, the knife beside it, and stumbles into the captain’s chair.

 “You go tell the others and have everyone search the boat for him. I’ll man the helm, and scan the water, hurry!” Wayne says, frantically swiveling the chair, searching all around for the unthinkable.

No cabin is unsearched, no door is unopened. The yacht is scoured from keel to mast. It appears William Rochester Sr. is no longer on it, he has simply disappeared!

Muster point is on deck. We all gather for a minute to try and make sense of the situation. The question no person wants to ask the other is, ‘Did the old man throw himself overboard?’

Suspicion points to Prince from Wayne. Upset to say the least upon hearing the accusation, Prince has to accept the threat to throw the old man off the boat came from him, and Wayne grabs him by the collar to threaten him into confession with a similar fate. A vicious fight breaks out between them.

Forcing myself between the brawling men, I push them away from each other. At the end of it are many facial cuts and bruises.

I encourage Wayne to go back to the helm with a gentle push. He shrugs me off in anger, saying he’s going to go send out a mayday signal to the coastguard with our coordinates.

The rest of us search again. All lifejackets are accounted for, and the captain’s cabin ransacked. The old man is gone!

Wayne locks the door to the wheel house from the inside, not even I will be allowed in. The rest of us lock ourselves inside our cabins awaiting the arrival of the coast guard.

 All previous questions remain unanswered, and now there are even more.

Wayne is broadcasting communication with the US coast guard. Seems we crossed the US/Mexico maritime border. At first light I thought days like this were the kind dreams are made of. It turned out to be a day of frightening events and revelations.

A haunting silence permeates the cabin and perhaps, the entire boat. I’m having flashbacks of the coffin the old man showed me inside his warehouse two years ago. Come to think of it, this was a coffin he never opened. My imagination is going wild.

I believed his success story two years ago. Now reality sinks in. The old chess master might have capitalized on my inexperience and drive to be, as he portrayed himself then, successful. Well…all has come to a heading on this, his magnificent final hoorah.

This daydream of mine, about the pinnacle of success, I can hardly believe it now: shipments of so called ‘exotic wood’ from South America, over-priced coffins for the notorious or suspiciously wealthy, warehouses upon warehouses of un-used lumber nesting all kinds of creatures, providing only a feast for fungi and worms and beetles and termites, missing relatives and business partners.

The Mexican coast guard, we are told, is chasing us, and today’s events will be difficult to explain, to any coastguard as well as to the police when or if we get home. Apparently there are secrets in the ‘Rochester & Rochester’ empire. This dream of mine, the pinnacle of success, has become the Rochester nightmare! Has my role begun? Will I be the one to either save or unravel this ‘Rochester & Rochester’ empire?