Román Leão

Tag: short-story

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 3 [ficção]

    That must have been some really good coke. It what seemed like no time at all, Zongo and I had hacked our way through the heavy stuff and were starting to see moonlight coming through the other side.

    The night was dead quiet except for what I took for the hypnotic crashing of the surf somewhere far in the distance. I was the first to break through the undergrowth and distinctly heard the sound of a bullet being chambered. Once you’ve been on the wrong side of that sound, you never forget it. I stopped cold. Zongo, clueless to the situation, blundered right into me knocking us both out into the open.

    My mind reeled as it took in the scene of the biggest Moon I had ever seen silhouetting a Victorian mansion and a helicopter with a surfboard lashed to the bottom of it.

    “Hey, man, ever been shot?” A voice out of the darkness questioned.

    “Holy fuck!” Zongo exploded and shoved me aside. “It’s Charlie Fucking Perigo! Who shot you, you fucking maniac?”

    “Charlie did,” Perigo said. “Zongo, you son-of-a-bitch. What are you and your buddy trying to do, give me the heebie jeebies? You know I have a delicate constitution.”

    “The only thing delicate about you, Chuck, are them fancy panties you wear under those baggies.”

    “You ought to know, Freddie, I got them from your sister.”
    The two went on and on, playing the dozens until I finally broke in. “So I take it you two know each other?”

    It turned out that Zongo and Charlie met right after he’d come back from Vietnam and they had been thick as thieves for a while. I guess they just kind of lost touch when Zongo went south to to be part of the San Francisco scene. Both Charlie and I laughed our asses off when he told us the story about the how the Condor sign talked to him one night. Who’s to say? I’ve seen, if not crazier things, some pretty weird shit out there on the edge.

    Well, we spent a good piece of time there in the courtyard, laughing and smoking some primo weed that Charlie was holding. At one point, we had been talking about all the heads that had been showing up in Mendo, and wouldn’t be cool if we had a place where we could all hang out together where we wouldn’t get hassled.

    Zongo took a big hit and looked kind of philosophically up at the moon so that we followed his gaze. “Have I got an idea!” he said once he had blown out the hit, and that was that. Girassol was reborn.

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout (Rock Hound Magazine, 1970)
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Tibetan Bells & a Bird from Hell
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 1

    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Khumalo 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Don’t Poke the Bear (Pt. 1)
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Don’t Poke the Bear (Pt. 2)
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Khumalo 3
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 3
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Chae Burton 1

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Don’t Poke the Bear (Pt. 1) [ficção]

    The black ’65 Lincoln Continental idled at the curb of the decrepit Victorian on Webster St. in the Lower Haight. Dry weeds reached out from a parched patch of dirt as if straining to see their sorry reflection in the perfectly polished chrome hubcaps. The driver, an Irishman named Bearach Shane, just Bear to friends and enemies alike, had been in this position many times driving for Zev Avidan’s record company. Shane was a man who knew where in the City to get just about anything one could want, and what Lucious Cole wanted was trouble.

    The house was a well-established stop on the downhill slide, and many customers who Shane escorted there over the years soon dropped clear out of sight. Once in a while he would see some former young and hungry musician down in the Tenderloin walking the streets in the zombie shuffle that all junkies eventually seemed to affect; the ones that didn’t just flat out stop breathing, that is.

    Still, Shane understood the drive to match their everyday lives with the thrill and adrenaline rush of the stage. Most professional musicians lived for that hour or two or three of total connection both with their art and their admirers. Everything else, whether it was sitting on a bus, sitting on a plane, sitting backstage, or sitting at home, was unbearable drudgery. And once they were pulled into that higher state, well, you just couldn’t yank out the plug in the same way that the roadies disassembled the back line.

    Shane also understood addiction; he came from a long line of alcohol enthusiasts. That wasn’t to say that he had some horrible back story, no worse than anyone else’s back in the day, no priest or drunk uncle ever laid a hand on him. Regardless, it fell to the old neighborhood palookas to raise him up as much as anybody could, or would, take credit for.

    Shane had grown up in the fog-shrouded streets of the Sunset District, just down the street from Celestial Records, although the building wasn’t a record company back in his youth. The square, two-story cinderblock office had once been a neighborhood gym, and he had spent a lot of time in his youth, working the heavy bag and sparring in the regulation-sized ring.

    A lot of people in the neighborhood said that he could have been a Golden Gloves champion if he had stuck with it, but Bear had other, less lofty, aspirations. By the time he was in his twenties, Bear knew the intricacies of navigating the City’s streets and alleyways as well as its myriad political and racial factions. He probably could have run for a seat as a City Supervisor, and won, but as he liked to tell people who asked, he wasn’t that corrupt.

    Shane rolled down the driver side window, lit a Camel unfiltered, and checked his thinning red hair in the rear view. The one conceit he was unwilling to make to Father Time was losing the fiery tint that marked him as a mac na hÉireann, or son of Ireland. Every six weeks he slipped into the back door of a beauty salon run by a Vietnamese refugee named Rosy and chased the gray away for another month and a half.

    His one vulnerability surveyed and assuaged, Shane clicked the radio on, leaving it low so he could still hear if there was trouble afoot. The late night DJ was talking up Cole’s upcoming run of shows and his eyes automatically shifted to the house. Anybody’s money whether tha’ English fucker was going to make his gig, he mused, at the same time wondering about the feasibility of getting some action going regarding that bet.

    He knew some old school hard-asses from back home that would love to see Cole go down if only because he was the Queen’s subject. Bear was more pragmatic than that, coupled with the fact that “back home” for him was about three miles away from where he was parked; he couldn’t fault the man for where he was born.

    Plus, the poor sod was under the ol’ broad’s thumb as much as anyone, maybe more. Shane knew enough professionals to understand that once a Brit started making a decent piece of change, her taxmen sniffed it out like the rotten bulldogs they were, and they’d be lucky to have a pot left to piss in.


    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout (Rock Hound Magazine, 1970)
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Tibetan Bells & a Bird from Hell
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 1

    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Khumalo 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 2
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 2

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick [ficção]

    The self-ordained Zongo Khumalo descended the short staircase that led out of the back of Sammy’s Burger Shack where he had just been asked to turn in his whites and, in the words of the owner—a self-avowed asshole not named Sammy—“get the fuck out.”

    Khumalo reached into the breast pocket of the scratchy fuchsia polo shirt he had been required to purchase for the distinct privilege of flipping not Sammy’s shitty burgers and removed a battered red and white Marlboro soft pack containing a half-smoked joint of sinsemilla, the first half of which may have had a deleterious effect on the morning’s events.

    “Fuck it,” he announced to the Pacific Ocean that slapped just beyond the asphalt escarpment marking the edge of the Burger Shack’s domain and held a good bit of related detritus to help bolster the claim. A profusion of small star-shaped flowers of white, pink, and purple competed with similarly-hued burger wrappers for the privilege of being the landscaping’s most prominent feature.

    Khumalo had just taken a large hit when a convertible Oldsmobile came smashing into the Shack’s gravel parking lot like an iron meteorite. Just when he thought the heavy chunk of Detroit steel was going to end up becoming an artificial reef, the driver locked up the disc brakes and jerked his wheel to the left sending the machine into a four-wheel slide and kicking up a fuck-ton of dirt, rocks, and duck shit in the process.

    When the dust finally cleared, Khumalo expected to lock eyes with a typical wired-to-the-gills gearhead or one of the usual gonzo surfers that frequented the Shack after the morning break; instead, he was surprised to see—back-lit by the Sun still-rising toward apogee—a spitting image of Jesus the Christ himself.

    Charlie Perigo threw open the perfectly balanced driver-side door—back when Detroit rolling stock still had bodies “designed by Fisher”—and immediately zeroed in on Khumalo who stood agape in the slowly settling cloud of debris dressed in his grease-spattered polo with his joint hanging from his bottom lip held by a thin scrim of moisture.

    “Hey, brother,” Perigo addressed the incredulous ex-line cook. “What’s burnin’?” Khumalo turned back toward Sammy’s to see a plume of black smoke climbing out of the slowly turning rusted rooftop turbine vent.

    “That would probably be the lunch rush,” he answered, retrieving the now-extinguished joint and pointing toward the shack with it.

    “Not that,” the apparent maniac pointed at his hand. “That.”

    “Oh, right,” Khumalo recalibrated his first impression of Big J’s stunt double as he fumbled for his Zippo lighter.

    The two born iconoclasts connected with the natural force of a chemical reaction, Khumalo soon finding himself in the 442’s passenger seat, hanging on for dear life as the appropriately-named Perigo took the sharp shoreline turns at a full four-barrel roar.

    Perigo shouted something over the car’s 400-cubic-inch engine in maximum thrum as whole dinosaur dynasties were vaporized and shot out the dual exhaust, never to be thought of again.

    “What?” Khumalo shouted back in a register he didn’t recognize. As the Oldsmobile’s tight suspension groaned to counteract the brutal physics involved in the questionable choices Perigo was making on the turns, the force of inertia bent him toward the driver whom he began to suspect was completely insane.

    “I asked you,” Perigo shouted as he slammed the Hurst shifter into a higher gear, “have you ever been shot?” Before Khumalo could answer one way or another—and to tell the truth, he would have said “no,” had he time to gather his wits about him—Perigo lifted his white T-shirt to reveal an even whiter scar on his abdomen. The former cook took the bait.

    “Who shot you?” Williams finally played his part perfectly, coming in on cue as if rehearsed.

    “Charlie,” Perigo answered and started laughing like the lunatic Williams had now decided he most definitely was. Even years later, throughout the arc of their friendship, whenever the two men got together they performed their ritualistic greeting, each time Perigo dissolving into laughter so that Williams never did find out if it was the Vietcong or actually the man himself who pulled the trigger.

    “So, you were in ’Nam, man?” Williams asked, blindly groping around the floorboard for his dropped Zippo so he might steady his nerves for the next hairpin turn.

    “I did one tour and then got the fuck out,” Perigo shouted, deftly swerving to miss a dead fawn in the middle of the road.

    “Whaddya do there, if you don’t mind me asking?” Khumalo asked as he struggled to light what was left of his joint in the jet stream pouring in around the car’s windshield.

    “Chopper pilot,” Perigo answered, shifting into a gear that Khumalo was sure had no place on the Shoreline Highway.

    “You were a ’stick?’’’ Khumalo asked, passing the joint and hoping that its effects might just tame the maniac behind the wheel.

    “No, man,” Perigo corrected, taking a massive hit before losing the roach to the wind. “The stick.”

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1

  • Submission (A Correspondence in Three Parts)

    (1)
    Greetings XXXX XXXXXXXX editors,

    I wanted to thank you all for sending my return envelope back; I’m just not sure what kind of message you were trying to send. Was the empty envelope a metaphor for the howling void that we all must someday face? Or perhaps my submission just left you speechless and unable to respond? I’m sure that with time, and the proper medicine, I’ll suss it out and all will finally be revealed… or, I could just ask. So, ’erm… what’s the deal?

    Yours envelopically,
    Ray Larsen

    (2)
    Hi Mr. Larsen,

    I hope you haven’t been deteriorating into madness while awaiting our reply.

    I apologize for the empty envelope and the subsequent foray into the land of unanswered questions. While I would like to claim artistic genius and expressive intent, it was sadly just a mistake. As the assistant editor (i.e. graduate student) I possess a very fine skill set for stuffing, licking and sending envelopes. Your envelope, unfortunately, missed the crucial first step. And now I must re-evaluate my postal prowess, sigh.

    Well, at the very least I can relieve your sufferings—the envelope was meant to hold a lovely blue little slip, bearing our logo and this message: “Thank you for your recent submission to XXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXX. Though we are unable to include your work in this issue, we are glad that you gave us the opportunity to consider it. We wish you success in placing your work elsewhere. Thanks again, The Editors.”

    It tries very hard to be friendly while inevitably informing you that we are crushing dreams. We don’t like that part of the job much and we know that you like it even less, so really, I’m quite sorry that you were subjected to the empty envelope.

    Really it’s quite a profound little piece of paper. The color is really quite nice. And the size is wonderful. I’ve spent tens of minutes in the copy room, brushing off my math skills to figure out exactly what size will fit into a variety of envelopes.

    If you would like the little blue slip that the envelope was meant to contain, I’ll happily send it along. It’s a very nice slip.

    Yours apologetically,
    XXXXXXX XXXXXX
    Assistant Editor
    XXX

    PS Hopefully this little blunder doesn’t mean you will be too incapacitated by the proper envelop-related medications to submit to us in the future!

    (3)
    Greetings Ms. XXXXXX,

    Thank you for your enlightening, entertaining, and timely response to the vacant envelope imbroglio. At no time did I mean to impugn your prowess as it applies to stuffing, licking, etc. I am sure that the sheer volume of correspondence lends itself to the occasional unintended mystery.

    Please don’t let this aspect of your responsibilities weigh any heavier on your conscience than does the slip itself. I, for one, have started an art project with the myriad beautifully colored papers that have been sent my way. I am sure that the one you have been charged with discharging is lovely.

    I imagine it to be a medium Persian blue, as was the binding of Bailey’s A Treatise on the Seven Rays, reflecting a possible theosophical bent on the part of XXX. Or perhaps it is a less esoteric, but no less historically relevant, Prussian blue—one of the first synthetic pigments ever developed, and interestingly, an antidote for heavy metal poisoning.

    I don’t want to make more work for you, however, and I will simply wait until my next submission works its way through the editorial process. I will force myself to be content with the seasonally apropos light spring green version I still hold and cherish.

    Yours in the wild blue yonder,
    Ray Larsen

  • The Buzzing—Jim Knipfel

    I don’t know if Jim Knipfel presaged the conspiracy-laden epoch we find now ourselves mired in, or perhaps somehow helped to manifest it—a conspiracy theory in its own right. In 2003’s The Buzzing, we are treated to the sensational spinout of newspaper reporter, Roscoe Baragon, once a globe-trotting newshound who is now content with covering the “freak beat” for the New York Sentinel, itself a not-yet-failing enterprise, but the check is in the mail.

    All the time-honored tropes of noir are present here. Part of the reason Baragon stays at the paper is “the fact that was working in what he assumed was the last office space in New York City in which he would be allowed to smoke at his desk.” Instead of a girl Friday, he has a city forensic pathologist, Emily, who also spends too much time holding down a stool at their favorite dive bar after work.

    Of course, no noir would be complete without a city editor riding our protagonist’s ass about filing a story. Ed Montgomery revels in his roll, “sleeves rolled up, tie undone, a porcine face that grew a magnificent shade of magenta whenever he got angry—and he was almost always angry.”

    As a former newspaperman myself, Knipfel’s time writing for the New York Press helps lend a certain credence to his depiction of the business at the cusp of the information age. Baragon still has to occasionally get off his prodigious posterior to—in the parlance—slap some shoe leather in order to put his increasingly unhinged copy together.

    At one point, lost in conspiratorial mania, he steals an atlas (an atlas!) to physically connect the dots of a far-fetched theory. At this remove, it comes off as quaint, and leads one to wonder just what sort of insane shit someone could concoct if all of the world’s information was at your fingertips. Oh. Oh, yea.

    It would be a disservice to lay out all of the disparate points that Baragon connects like some fucked up The Family Circus dotted-line recap, but let’s just say it ends up containing proverbial multitudes. Godzilla? Check. An undersea toga-wearing real estate cult? Sure, why the fuck not? It is all certainly no stranger than imaging that the Democratic party was running a child sex trafficking ring out of the non-existent basement of a DC pizza parlor.

    It seems that Knipfel has slowed down, his last novel, Residue, was published in 2015. Perhaps the retinitis pigmentosa that has plagued him his whole life has finally caught up with him, although his website claims that “his other senses have been honed to almost superhuman levels, save for those dulled flat by years of chain smoking, alcohol abuse, and punk rock.” It would be a shame if he is sitting these days out as he certainly had our number from the jump.

    “Oh, all the conspiracies were evil and horrible and terrifying, yes—but where would they be without them? There has to be a certain tingle of superiority in knowing you were the only person in the world who really knew what the score was. Conspiracies, mover, also help make the normal redundancies of life a little more bearable. More than bearable even—they made things exciting.”

    Penguin Random House

    Also by this author:
    These Children Who Come at You With Knives, and Other Fairy Tales: Stories

  • (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions—Steve Almond


    I picked up this collection of essays from Boston writer (and Bay Area native) Steve Almond on a total whim and found it to be one of the explosively funny books I’ve read since Ozzy’s autobiography. Almond is just nuts—and honest to a fault—which may or may not be a product of his insanity.

    Not that You Asked is organized thematically with the chapter entitled About My Sexual Failure (Not that You Asked) being the most cringe-worthy of the bunch. In the extended piece Shame On Me (Why My Adolescence Sucked Donkey Cock), we are regaled with tales of his late-blooming sexuality via the water jets in the Almond family hot tub; hand jobs con sharp, inexperienced, fingernails; the family dog’s rooting out of a used condom from the trash and subsequent tug-of-war with Almond’s mother leading to predictable, but no less horrifying results; and getting publicly busted for shoplifting condoms and Sta-Hard gel from Longs Drugs.

    Chestfro Agoniste and My First Fake Tits reveal waxing and breast implants to both be somewhat less wonderful than advertised, the former resulting in this conversation painfully recounted by Almond. “Me: Ow! Please. Please, don’t—Fuck! Her: It’s almost out. Me: You have to do it faster, really—No! Ow! Fuck! Please move to another—that part really—Owwww! Her: Stop being a baby. Me: Please, sweetie. Please, I’m not joking. Her: Lie still. Just fucking lie still and let me— Me: Owwwww! You fucking bitch! You mean fucking bitch!”

    For every writer who has attempted to wince his or her way through a sex scene, Almond offers a 12-step program that lays out some pretty good (and common sense) advice, such as, Step 5 (Real people do not talk in porn clichés): “Most of the time, real people say all kinds of weird, funny things during sex, such as ‘I think I’m losing circulation,’ and ‘I’ve got a cramp in my foot,’ and ‘Oh, sorry!’”

    Given my utter lack of interest in the sport of baseball, it took me awhile to battle my way through one of the longer essays in the collection, Red Sox Anti-Christ, which ended up having some interesting and insightful things to say about sport and its place in a war-loving society such as our own. He equates the coverage of the kick off to the invasion of Iraq with a major sporting event. “Nightly highlight reels charted the day’s major offensive drives. Correspondents offered sand swept on-the-field interviews with our burly combatants, while generals served up bromides fit for a head coach.”

    Almond goes further and takes part of the blame for the unnecessary war onto his own shoulders. “As a fan, I had helped foster a culture governed by the sports mentality, in which winning mattered above all else, and the application of violence was seen as a necessary means to that end rather than a betrayal of our democratic standards.”

    In a chapter entitled In Tribute to My Republican Homeys, Almond turns on the vitriol. Demagogue Days, Or How the Right-Wing Hateocracy Chewed Me Up and Spat Me Out spins the story of how Almond, an adjunct professor at Boston College at the time, resigns over the school’s invitation of Condoleezza Rice to give the commencement speech. Almond uses the format of Dante’s descent into hell to map out all of the insidious devils of punditry that all wanted a piece of him for a brief, terrifying moment.

    With the ability to ride out ridiculous situations with the artistry of a Mavericks surfer (see How Reality TV Ate My Life), one starts to wonder just what would really get to Almond, what would crack his smooth, white chocolate exterior and let the creamy nougat pour forth?

    That force majeure comes in the form of a baby girl, the arrival of whom is hilariously recounted in 10 Ways I Killed My Infant Daughter in Her First 72 Hours of Life. It is this window into the hopes and fears that people have shared from time immemorial, that saves Not That You Asked from being simple a collection of ravings from another smart ass cynic. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

    Random House

    Also by this author:
    Which Brings Me to You

  • The Inexorable March [ficção]

    Jerome Michael Gonçalo parked his beater Toyota pick-up in the Vallejo Ferry Terminal garage, made the sign of the cross, and hustled off to the kiosk to pay. He always chuckled to himself when the machine asked how many days you wanted to stay; as if he would ever leave the vehicle—beat-up or not—overnight.

    Shit, only thing left would be the paint, he mused before the boat to San Francisco let out a warning blast that carried across the four lanes of Mare Island Way, telling all around that they had better get their asses in gear.

    Parking receipt in hand, Gonçalo checked for traffic—knowing that he, himself, was often coming in hot this time of morning—before sprinting across the expanse of asphalt against the light.

    “Jamoke! You almost missed it, brah,” an African-American ferryman half again his size shouted out from behind the aluminum plinth whose only discernible function was to shore up the man’s bulk as he pointed toward the waiting hydrofoil bobbing on the tide.

    One morning, Gonçalo made the mistake of introducing himself as “J-Mike,” which was immediately misconstrued as “Jamoke,” an appellation that gave the older, and much larger, man no end of amusement.

    “Devánte,” Gonçalo panted, disturbingly out-of-breath, “I knew you’d hold it for me, even if you had to grab that rope!”

    “No way, brah,” the man laughed, “we’re on a schedule. Very tight. Like your mom.”

    “Keep it professional, D.,” Gonçalo half-heartedly protested as he reached for the lanyard that held his transit card, only to realize that he wasn’t wearing it. He glanced toward the now-shuttered ticket windows at the terminal. Closed signs announced the inexorable march toward having every human interaction removed from one’s day. And yet, he silently bemoaned, Devánte persists.

    Gonçalo wondered what the folks that had worked those windows were waking up to today, having been replaced by a phone app. He weighed the odds of rushing back to the house for the card but quickly calculated that he’d never make it back in time for the next boat. That would mean driving into the City, a trip that took two maddening hours just days before.

    He had already come to terms with the fact that he would rather be skinned alive than undergo that ordeal again as he had barely made it to work the last time without pissing himself in traffic. Gonçalo had briefly thought about drinking less coffee in the morning and immediately realized that it would never actually happen. Public urination verses the murder charge that would surely follow going cold turkey was a steep, but manageable, price to pay.

    “Use the app, brah,” Devánte, having astutely read the situation, advised. “Your phone, Jamoke.”

    Gonçalo pivoted to attempting to use the very cell phone application that resulted in the sacking of the station agents and felt badly for a moment. The moment passed as the intended exchange failed with an abrasive electronic bleat.

    “Y-eaz-ou l-eaz-ose,” Devánte intoned, revealing a probable past spent somewhere on the midway. “Jump on, Jamoke. This cross must move.”

    Devánte’s counterpart on board the craft rattled off some half-heard, less-understood, instructions. Gonçalo stared blankly at the black rectangle in his hand as he moved toward an open seat and plopped down with a certain resignation.

    All morning, Cassandras on the local news gleefully warned of power blackouts and the possible closure of outdoor public spaces as an impending heatwave threatened to blanket the entire West. Gonçalo had chosen to wear a leaf-patterned Hawaiian shirt in a light fabric, although now he was feeling that perhaps it was sending the wrong message about his mood.

    As the engines below the craft begin to churn the cold morning waters of the Bay, he thought about stepping outside in the quickly warming air and slipping unseen over the rail, his cell phone dropping from his hand and sinking to the muddy bottom even quicker than he himself would.