Revolution Number 9 Read Online Free

threw back the covers with more force than necessary and got up.
    A few minutes later, carrying a thermos of yesterday’s reheated coffee, wearing long johns, wool pants, flannel shirt, sweater, oilskins, and rubber boots, Charlie walked down the path from his back door and onto the dock. The wind was blowing harder than he had thought, whipping sound from the bare trees, the wires, the rigging of the boats on the pond, like the conductor of a rough-and-ready orchestra. It was a cold wind, and stung his face. Charlie, boarding
Straight Arrow
, whistled into it; a tune of his own devising, inspired by bebop, and far from New Age.
    Straight Arrow
was a beamy twenty-six foot Corea with a hundred and sixty-five–horse Palmer diesel. Charlie had bought it at a DEA auction of seized smuggling assets. He had scraped off its red paint, repainted it white, changed its name from
Shake Dat Ting
and added a small deckhouse for days like this. He switched on the engine, felt it rumble under his feet, and cast off.
    Charlie took
Straight Arrow
across the pond at half throttle.A plume of light snowflakes hooked down from the clouds, and then another. Not enough to affect visibility, he thought, steering through the cut, under the bridge, out to sea. Almost immediately, a wave broke over the bow, smacking hard against the Plexiglas screen of the pilothouse. Suddenly the air was white with driving snow and Charlie felt as cold as though he were wearing nothing at all. He was considering turning back when another wave came smashing in, looped over the screen and caught him in the face. Icy water ran down his neck, seeped through the wool sweater, the flannel shirt, the long johns. Charlie laughed, laughed at the futility of his preparation, preparation in general.
    And all at once he was fully awake, shocked into an acute state of consciousness, where he heard every change in the pitch of the wind, saw the individual patterns of the snowflakes that flew by his eyes, felt the currents of cold, some wet, some dry, that came from all directions. Fully awake for the first time in how long? And fully aware of the power of the sea to do with him as it pleased. Well, you either slipped through the cracks or you didn’t. Charlie laughed again, loud and free with no one to hear him, and swung
Straight Arrow
west, into the weather.
    Charlie’s floats were red with three white stripes. They were lined up with landmarks—the lighthouse, the water tower, the radio station antenna—but Charlie couldn’t see any landmarks, only the violent circle of seascape immediately around him, bounded by the pointillist walls of a white cocoon. He kept going, although he knew that he would have to run right over one of his floats in order to see it.
    After a few minutes, he did. A wave tossed up a flash of red and white off the starboard side; Charlie slowed, circled, and grabbed the float on his first pass.
My lucky day
, he thought.
    With
Straight Arrow
in neutral, rising and falling on moving hills of water, Charlie uncoupled the line from the float, hooked it to the winch in the stern, and hit the switch. Nothing happened. He glanced at the motor. The casing was covered by a sheet of ice. He kicked it, not hard, and tried the switch a few more times. Nothing—and not the moment for taking motors apart. He began pulling by hand.
    Charlie had five pots on the line, spread along the bottom ata depth of about fifty feet. They were old, waterlogged, heavy. Charlie pulled. His body wasn’t the kind Milanese couturiers cut suits for; but useful for what he was doing now.
    The first pot came up covered in seaweed, and empty inside. The second was empty too. And the third and the fourth. Despite the cold, Charlie was sweating by the time the last pot broke the surface. It seemed much heavier than the others—he was barely able to haul it over the stern. For a moment he thought he must be getting old. Then he looked between the slats. In the fifth pot was the biggest