My tongue feels gritty, and I’m having trouble finding my right hand. I delay moving because I’m pretty sure there’s going to be pain involved.
Stage one, I remain comfortably sprawled on my back with the lower half of me entangled in twisted sheets and my right arm crimped under my pillow. I push my numb arm towards the pillow at the other side of the bed hoping to restore circulation in all kinds of ways. “Mark?”
Silence. I pry one eye open. In the half light, I detect the shadow of an indentation. I pull the pillow over my face and savor the faint trace of musk and sweaty hair. Before I can slip back into my fantasies, the alarm by the bed spoils my feelings of God-like powers. Reaching for the snooze bar triggers the headache. I must replace that cheap Mexican brandy with decent Tequila.
My slacks, shirt, socks, and panties mark a trail like unconsumed bread crumbs leading from the door to the bed—Mark and I were in a hurry. I collect the evidence of my precipitous sexual engagement while I stumble to the bathroom. Still only one toothbrush in a glass beside the basin. Where did I lose my bra?
Stage two. I select the new outfit I’d bought recently during the summer sale at Macy’s. The sun peeps through breaks in the trees and creates strings of sparkling points of dew like Christmas lights in my rose hedge. Through the open window in my dining nook, New Orleans smells fresh from overnight showers and the beautiful flowers that my neighbor raises in profligate profusion. A house wren serenades me from my magnolia tree, and a lake breeze promises perfect weather. Disgusting; I shall crawl back in bed and pull the covers over my head.
I rinse the remains of yesterday’s soup from the cereal bowl and slice my last ripe peach. The coffee mill has delivered an aromatic mix of Ghirardelli White Chocolate and finely ground dark roasted beans. While steaming fresh coffee sputters from my little Espresso Machine I retrieve my newspaper from the weedy expanse of my side yard. I carry the pot over to the table and pour the rich black Brazilian blend into my favorite mug while I settle down to catch up on the local news.
At least I have all the sections, this morning. For a change, Pooch, my neighbor’s Cocker Spaniel, has left the Times-Picayune intact. Perhaps the dog is ill from ingesting too much newsprint. I’ve got to scan this fast because my taskmaster Nightwing Laboratory is waiting. I jump start each Monday morning at the office.
The editorial page is spread in front of me, and I am scanning the latest quotes from a group of outraged environmentalists camped downstream from one of our largest oil refineries and an adjacent plastics plant. The environmental group is pushing a controversy that promises to generate more business for my testing laboratory: allegations of contaminated soil; a pregnant women sick from drinking well water; lost business from a sport fishing outfit. Not to expound on my cynicism, but most of the time the “proofs” offered in these cases don’t stand up to scientific analysis.
Some of my best friends are smart and ethical lawyers who pursue their cases accordingly, but there are legal firms specializing in and chasing after environmental cases that are just plain dumb—or realize that their paycheck depends more on dramatic cliché than on hard facts. I guess that’s not so dumb after all if you want to make money off the misfortune of sick people. I remember that Mark had gotten a bit prickly last night when I brought up something about the environmental issues around New Orleans. Something about jobs and people needed gasoline for their cars. Where did he say he worked? I can’t remember if we’d talked about his job. In retrospect, Mark really is not very interesting, but his body is great.

“The line of showers that moved through the New Orleans area last night will continue south into the Gulf, today. Monday’s forecast calls for clearing along the coast from Biloxi, Mississippi west to Lake Charles, Louisiana. The marine forecast predicts: northerly winds offshore at fifteen knots, decreasing to five knots by this evening. Tonight’s outlook: seas calm with a low tide at Morgan City at 12:32 A.M.” Noel Webster’s large fist came down on the clock radio with the delicacy of an expert boxer pulling his punch. The green numbers on the dial face blurred briefly as he rolled upright—life reminding him of time passing. He should have kept his appointment with his doctor, last week.
Silence in the house, untouched by the faint slap of his bare feet on cool tile as he padded into the kitchen in his boxers and set a kettle of water on the stove. He squinted in the half light at the refrigerator door where his housekeeper had scrawled a message on the magnetic pad. “Packages of Oatmeal in drawer, new jar of coffee on the second shelf.”
He dug around in the drawer to the left of the stove top and came up with peach flavored instant cereal. The jar of instant coffee was sealed with a foil liner that burst when he stuck a finger through the thin metal. A puff of brown powder turned to mud in the water splattered at the edge of the sink. There was a plate, a mug, a bowl, and some flatware resting in the drain by the kitchen sink—all one man needed, really. Webster dumped what he estimated to be a couple of heaping teaspoons of instant coffee into the mug and emptied the cereal pouch into the bowl.
He settled at the kitchen table to wait for the water to boil, not bothering to turn on the lights. A passing garbage truck rattled the unused china stacked in the glass fronted cabinet in the dining room. In a few minutes the kettle whistling on the stove added another lonely sound.
After forcing down the cardboard cereal and the flat taste of dehydrated coffee, Noel tried working out in his spare bedroom. Nothing seemed to satisfy him. He punched and shoved at the imaginary boxer that swung from the hook overhead. The dummy didn’t punch back, a situation that he found irritating, especially this morning.
Too many unimportant things were colliding all at once, all taking time away from the serious problems in his current life. He yearned for a good, clean fight, some conflict well defined, not as shadowy or as illusive as Jell-O. He dredged up fond memories of his college boxing career, though he didn’t miss the broken nose and bruised ribs.
Noel was worried about Morgan’s new project, a program of materials testing and qualification for nuclear power generating facilities. He was worried as her lawyer, and he was worried as her friend.
Noel felt protective and even fatherly towards Morgan, but there were times when he remembered how his daughter died and how Morgan had trembled in his arms, seeking shelter from an awful truth. He remembered how young she was, how vulnerable, as she rushed into his arms. But she was also mature for her years, and he’d known, deep in his unconscious, that she had more than innocent feelings towards him.
He tried a right uppercut that felt solid. He was still so much older, except now he was no longer her court appointed guardian. Did that make any difference? He couldn’t admit to himself that he was attracted to her.
She was grown up and didn’t need him like that, now, he argued with himself. Trouble was, he knew a lot of things that he hadn’t told Morgan about. He was still playing guardian, even if Morgan hadn’t agreed to his role. And that brought up a whole host of serious problems for Noel. For one thing, Morgan’s relative and Noel’s friend, Sam Friendly, had called to warn him about a threat from a Senator in Texas.
“I wanted you to know what might be going down, and I didn’t want to worry Morgan. She’s got so many things on her plate as it is,” Sam had explained. The Senator’s investors are being hurt. Separate a politician from the source of his money…well, damned dangerous.”
Noel agreed with Sam. With a full schedule of municipal water testing and port monitoring, he didn’t know how Morgan was going to manage the nuclear project in Beaumont. Oh, she’d manage, somehow; she had a good field tech on site. However, Noel knew that these giant projects were the spawning grounds for serious corruption, and Morgan was putting herself right in the middle of that battleground. Morgan could easily become an unwelcome cog in the schemes of others, a small gear to be broken and discarded.
The young woman was just too smart and too confident! He slammed a right into the padded bag and felt the pain shoot up his wrist. Christ, he felt so useless! Was this to be a repeat of what happened when his daughter was murdered? He jabbed with his left and felt another satisfying stab of pain shoot up his arm. All this pretended anger at Morgan, but Noel’s heart wasn’t in it. He knew what really bothered him.
Sam had called late last week. “I know you’ve never forgiven me about failing with Holly,” he said. “And, I kept you from being with us when we got to her and Morgan.”
“We’re still friends, Sam,” Noel had broken in—not really an admission. “I would have been in the way,” he had added. Down deep he didn’t really feel that way. You were a father. You had a right to fail with your own child, didn’t you? The blame should have rested on his shoulders, not with some one else—too easy to blame someone else.
“But this time, the ball is in your court,” Sam had continued. “I can’t help Morgan without tipping our hand. They might move on her sooner if they see me in the wings. You know how politicians are, Noel, especially if they’re running scared.”
“So this time it’s up to you with me as backup.” Sam said with finality.

      Down below, where I am at the moment, I put my feet up on the bunk and leaned my aging frame back against the padding under the old eight tract music system. I have extracted an unusual log book from the locker under the bunk and have started an entry that is long overdue. The log book, one might have given the one hundred year old volume in my hands the modern name of daily memo, is small enough to fit in my jacket pocket. The journal is protected by hard-cured hand-tooled ox hide and contains over a hundred pages of tough but thin, blank, well-preserved sheets of pure linen paper. A stylized tree decorates the cover and the pages are bound together with waxed linen thread of the highest quality.

      I bought the unused antique journal back in the 1950’s in a shop in Brighton, England, during one of my trips to the U.K. where I was busy gleaning information in computer security and cryptography. The Brits at that time were rather more advanced than the Americans in this field due to an early and canny interest in computerizing intelligence data dating back to the WWII. The journal according to the dealer, once belonged to Darwin, himself, though I rather doubted that that was anything other than a good sales pitch to a gullible American tourist. Since then I have come to believe that the provenance is at least possible.
      For reasons of boredom I had been browsing through the old ship chandler’s emporium downtown in New Orleans and ran across a classic fountain pen that used the old fashioned carbon ink. Putting the pen together with the antique journal inspired my imagination so that I decided I would set down some of my thoughts and a brief personal history in a way that might prove interesting to future generations. In fact, I have written this explanation down in what seems like nineteenth century antique English, as if my history is somehow already over and done with.

      After such an auspicious introduction, I placed the current month and year, October, 1977 across the top of the second page where I also included an extra blank line so that I can address these words to Morgan when the time comes.
      But before I could begin, I had to think about my story—what to include, what to winnow from the chaff-rich opacity of my life.
      My mother, Catherine, was a lovely woman from an East Texas family who was insane enough to marry my father and agree move near Lexington, Kentucky where my father had accepted a position as Dean at a small college. Mother once told me that I was born at home, helped into this world by a country doctor who was as familiar with his bottle of moonshine as he was at birthing babies. My father once joked about finding me in a basket in the woods. A record of my birth without a date was on file, but the text says that the original documents were lost when the courthouse in the little Kentucky town of Nicholasville burned down—a newspaper clipping described how the Feds and the local tobacco growers got heated up over allotment records. And that was about all my mother ever told me except to say that she was really glad to move back to New Orleans.
       In my line of work, a tenuous record of the past is occasionally useful. But what about my line of work? Morgan knows something about my consulting business, and I hope she will be interested enough to take over the public aspect of my consulting services if or ever the time for my retirement imposes itself on my will.
      Like most family histories, some of the stories are true and some are suspect. The generally accepted, short version of the family history tells us that the grandfather for whom I am named, Samuel Adams Friendly, married Morgana Lee Featherstone and settled down to a successful life of trade in a small town on the south side of Vicksburg, Mississippi. His two sons, my father Lee Adams Friendly and my father’s brother John Morgan Friendly, both married and had families. My uncle chose a farming sort of life and remained with his wife in Mississippi where he had one daughter, my cousin Mary Lee, who then married one Percy Nightwing in 1948. My father was more the wandering type, matriculated at Tulane in New Orleans where he received a degree in administration, then married my mother after meeting her while she was visiting New Orleans from her home in East Texas. After our return to New Orleans where Father accepted a position managing one of the more affluent private schools, I received one younger brother whom we lost when he was killed in Korea.
      I like to remember the trips from New Orleans to the Friendly farm in Mississippi when my brother and I were children. Our parents bundled us onto the early morning train that ran up north along the east bank of the Mississippi River from New Orleans. We traveled by ourselves carrying a lunchbox which we were supposed to share but often argued over. Late that afternoon, after an exciting day of starts and stops, waiting while our locomotive took on water, exchanging passengers arriving or departing at each of the numerous small towns along the way, we would be met by my Uncle John ‘s wife, a friendly, rather rotund woman named Matilda who smelled like hay and fresh butter.

     Aunt Matilda brought along my cousin Mary Lee as well as some of my cousin’s friends so that the neighbor’s children could both enjoy the ride and have a chance to see the big city of Vicksburg. Together, we drove back into the country laughing and screaming, sometimes hanging out the window of the old Ford, and no doubt driving poor Aunt Matilda half out of her mind.

     The Friendly holding was in the best part of a section of poor farm land where ignorant agricultural practices and unchecked erosion since the Civil War had carried most of the once-rich soil down the slopes in the direction of the Mississippi River southwest of Vicksburg. This was land steeped in history, or so we as children imagined. Several times, while playing in some of the abandoned fields, we came across civil war artifacts consisting of  broken bayonets  and fire bent gun barrels, a can full of rusty buckles, and some iron fragments of broken cannon balls. There were some bones that we weren’t allowed to keep, but Uncle John said they were old deer bones and weren’t important, anyway.

     I still possess some of these happy childhood items displayed in a glass case at my home in New Orleans which is located south of the Lake levees and west of the Seventeenth Street Canal.
      I had to pause in my writing to consider several important points.  I had lost track of my cousin on account of some minor feud between my father and his brother that led to the estrangement between the two families. When I was contacted in 1967 by my cousin’s lawyer, a New Orleans attorney named Noel Webster, I had received both sad news and good news. Mary Lee had died, but her daughter Morgan Lee Nightwing was anxious to reestablish family ties with me. I should have been delighted, but it seems as if I had resisted plunging into new relationship with my cousin’s daughter—misplaced pain of guilt, no doubt.  Maybe I hadn’t responded seriously or quickly enough when Noel told me that Morgan’s father, Percy, was threatening her over the inheritance of her mother’s few possessions.

     Dear God, what a terrible error!  Too late; Noal’s daughter died and Morgan had nearly been murdered by Percy right in my own home on her eighteenth birthday party. My relationship with Noel Webster has been close, yet difficult every since—and why not? I as much as promised him that I would rescue his daughter and I failed miserably, as it turned out.  Also, as I looked back over what I was determined to set down, I winced because I could see how I was building a case against myself.
      Not that Morgan would hold any of this against me.
      Thinking back through my uncertainties reminded me of someone with whom I had shared both the good times and the hard times—a man named Walter Onley. I was in the middle of wondering how much I could explain concerning my relationship with the mysterious Mr. Onley when tramping noises on the deck overhead announced that someone had come on board the Friendly Lady. Before I could rise, the hatch slid open over my head and a familiar face peered down into the cabin.
      “Uncle Sam!”
      I could tell by her expression that Morgan was both surprised and embarrassed at finding me on my boat. “Why Morgan, what a pleasant surprise. I didn’t expect to see you out here at the boat, this afternoon,” I returned, wondering to what occasion I owed the unexpected visit.
      Since I had heard two sets of footsteps on the deck above, I waited for Morgan to decide to introduce me to the person accompanying her. Eventually she gathered her wits about her and pretended to be overjoyed to see me.
      “Sam, I’m so glad you’re here so you can meet my friend, Mark Peters,” she had the decency to look embarrassed.
      Mr. Peters poked his head past Morgan’s shoulder and waived at me through the hatch opening. “Sorry to bother you, sir.”
      I recognized him as the clean cut kid that had taken up some part time work doing some rigging for a friend of mine who owned a yacht dealership. Knowing Morgan as I do, I suspect she was bringing Mark out to my boat for more than a bit of wine and conversation. At least I could offer the wine. They’d have to go somewhere else for the other matters. I managed to keep the smile off of my face, but I don’t think I fooled Morgan. “Open up and come one down,” I invited the youngsters. “I was just going to go through the wine cellar and see what needs drinking,” I added.
      Mark looked more interested than Morgan who was still looking vexed.
      “You have a wine cellar on board?” he seemed to find this interesting.
      “Well, nothing quite as grand as it sounds,” I reply. “The temperature in the bilge stays pretty constant being below the waterline, so I had a waterproof locker built in under the extra drinking water tanks. Morgan, why don’t you go select us something that looks good.” I emphasized good so Morgan, who knew where my stash was, would select something from the premium end of the collection—something perhaps like  the five year old French cabernet. Morgan brightened considerably at my suggestion.
      Morgan made her way towards the bow and opened a hatch under the eight track music system. I heard some clinking as she shifted the wine bottles on the rack. “So, how’s the rigging on that new Morgan going?” I asked Mark.
      Mark, who had fixed his gaze on Morgan’s rear as she was bending over the hatch into the bilge area, looked back at me. “Oh, I remember you, now,” he exclaimed, turning slightly red as he realized what he’d been doing. “You were watching us trying to step the mast last week.”
      “Looks like you were having a devil of a time slipping the mast through the blocks on the cabin roof,” I commented. I was referring to sixty two feet of heavy, cumbersome aluminum mast swinging about above the boat yard.
      “Well, the watertight boot was too small, so the whole thing seized up half way down. We had to winch it out twice before we could get it all the way to the keel block.”
      “Nice rigging design, though,” I add. “I’ve never seen a better dual spreader setup.” The spreaders are the struts that stick out of the side of the mast and brace the wire shrouds at an angle to the sides of the hull and stiffen the mast from side to side. Wire cables called stays brace the mast fore and aft.
      “Yes sir,” Mark followed up with, “but I don’t like the way the shrouds are attached to the hull. The best way is to attach them to straps molded solidly into the fiberglass, but these straps are bolted to the outside of the hull with half inch bolts over rubber sealing washers. I’d bet on them working loose and leaking in a heavy sea.”
     
      “Merely a minor nuisance,” Morgan announced by thumping a bottle of my best wine down on the galley top.  She located the corkscrew under the sink and cut the foil seal off the top of the cork with the rigging knife she has tied to a loop on her belt.
      I thought that bottle was well hidden at the back of the rack. “I see you found the better stuff,” I commented wryly, but Morgan merely turned one of her sphinx-like smiles in my direction. Mark had better look out!
      “What are you working on,” she wanted to know, indicating the log that was open in front of me. She handed the bottle to Mark and waited patiently while he struggled with the extraction, making it seem more like pulling a tooth. The cork made a nice little pop coming out and we all breathed a sigh of relief. I’d hate to think my forty dollar bottle of wine had gone bad.

      I can’t help but notice how his upper body expands the shirt in all of the right places, and how his narrow waist contributes the classic shape of an accomplished body builder. Did I notice this yesterday?  We could have been out sailing instead of here at the church. My imagination starts working overtime. There’s that room over the meeting room in the garage—the one with the rickety outside staircase and closed curtains. I think I may know why Mrs. Perkins is blushing.
      But, to business, first. For the pre-sermon women’s discussion group, today, Mr. Lehman has slipped out of his mother’s surveillance network and is settled at the folding table in the committee room with myself and four women. Probably, if it weren’t for fear of dire retribution from Chalmer’s mother, he would hang around with us girls more often.  (I was hoping for Mark, of course.)  Anyway, Chalmer’s mother, Matilda Lehman, is an unlovely woman in her nineties whom I liken to an ancient mother jackal who has adopted Lassie to replace her lost pup. Between the table and our committee there isn’t much room left. I notice that on the wall behind Chalmers some stains from old oil paint have appeared through the coat of fresh white paint applied only last year. I can pick out the outlines of old carpentry tools—a diagram  for a hammer, wood saw, possibly a drawknife, and something different that looks like a pickaxe. Funny that a meeting room of a church should have mysterious patterns of  wood working tools.
      Mr. Lehman (Chalmers) has neatly avoided any appearance of competition by selecting his position along the length of the table rather than at either end. He stands behind his chair waiting politely until we are all seated, and we women wonder if anyone will have the nerve to tell him that his blue slacks look positively awful with the pink shirt and black tie.  He has added a maroon and gold LSU blazer for that dressy touch.
      I, on the other hand, am turned out in a retro outfit consisting of tan polyester slacks topped in a vanilla blouse—a sugar cone with one scoop of ice cream.
      I settle into the position at the end of the table nearest to the outside door where the air is less polluted with the smells of heavy perfume. Some no doubt interpret this as staking a claim to leadership—arrogance in one so young. But who is to say whether I am at the head or the foot of the table? Besides, the antique grease stains in the concrete floor are worse at the other end. 
      The other four women range in age from mid-forties to a lady in her eighties who is snoring not so quietly at the end of the table opposite to me. Her head is rolled to one side and attached to an accordion-like neck that springs from the pleated collar of a stiffly starched blouse.  She must be our leader. In the absence of her opening remarks, I remind everyone that Chalmers has recently turned seventy. There is applause.
      We females and our one clandestine man are tasked with reporting on the dangers pornography represents to the young persons in our community. The older women don’t actually want to talk about the subject, Chalmers is afraid he’ll offend the tender sensibilities of us ladies, and I’m caught up in the middle of a fantasy in which I happily act out a porn scene with Mark. All this squirming around. At least the folding chairs have more padding than the work-hardened pews in the church.
      After the committee meeting comes the feast. Today we are served a cut of meat carved from the Book of Job that has gone-off—the meat, that is, not Job. The message is so depressing that I can hardly wait to get to the after-sermon announcements.
      Luther Bast, the Assistant Pasture as we jokingly refer to him behind his back, is a man who radiates great self importance. At the moment he is droning through one of his interminable announcements in which he managed to sermonize on some trivial subject he has picked at random from the morning news.
      In the  end I decide that a walk on the levee would be much more refreshing than further damage to my backside. Also, I should be there just in case Mark comes out for an early breath of fresh air. We must make new visitor feel welcome.
      However, the man who follows me out the door is our venerable Chalmers Lehman, sans momma. Big fat raindrops begin spattering in dark spots across the pavement while the tops of the palms at the end of the block sway in my direction.
      Mr. Lemans’ black eyes are twinkling under the aggressive thrust of his white bushy eyebrows as he corners me with the offer of shelter under his umbrella. Too late to make a dash for the parking lot; we are caught in a typical New Orleans cloudbursts. This one arrives unexpectedly, howling down from an innocent fluff of cotton suddenly turned dark and ominous over our heads. We flinch as lightening strikes the cross on top of the Catholic Church across the street. A cascade of sparks is extinguished against the wet slate roof tiles; the crack of thunder is followed by a boom echoing off of the apartment buildings in the shopping center over on Robert E. Lee. Otherwise, the sound rolls away from us into an expanding ring; I count seconds and estimate when the ripple passes over the Mississippi River. At the pilot’s station on Algiers Point, a river pilot will be muttering “better there than here.”
      “A sign, perhaps?” Chalmers chuckles, a little breathless as he adjusts our hemispherical shelter against a strong gust.
      Three others of our flock, also punished for leaving early, are left unprotected as their private shelter blows into an inverted column of tattered rags whipping in the wind.
      Mr. Lehman and I retreat behind the insubstantial protection of an ivy covered screen that is stretched between the vestibule support on the main building and an iron lamp post next to the sidewalk. I become acutely aware of two things: first, my Birkenstocks are soaked with water splashing out of the downspout; second, my vanilla blouse is wet.
      Mr. Lehman, ever the gentleman, averts his eyes from a view I am certain he would appreciate. “So, Ms. Nightwing, how’s Mary doing?” he says loudly enough to be heard over the thrumming of the downspout.
      The context spins like a roulette wheel in my brain and comes up on the house zero. Meanwhile, the edge of the rain shower passes and a band of brilliant sunlight sweeps in from lakeside. The atmosphere changes from ozone fresh to the density of lead as I bend down to remove my squishy shoes. I wriggled my toes in a puddle of water and try to think who this “Mary” might be.
      “Mary Mouton, your engineer,” Chalmers prompts. “I knew her mother extremely well. A girl with social pretensions, you know. Flavor of the month, years ago. The only one of three Boudreaux daughters supposed to have married well.”
      Chalmers purses his lips. “You might say that Hamilton Mouton had a little money and plenty of pretensions.”