Good Ship Gould by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

9

Avon Calling

✽✽✽

I heard the captain ask if it was the Avon Lady. I didn’t turn to look at him. I couldn’t turn to look at him. It was impossible to turn away from what I was seeing.

​ Back home, we lived pretty far off the beaten path, if you will. Out in the sticks, among the hard-pack dirt roads that cut between all the farms and fields and such. But we’d still seen our share of the hometown Avon Lady. How she ever got out to our place, I’ve never quite figured out. There was never a car anywhere in sight on the ten or eleven times I knew she’d visited. I suppose I was struck by the same thought right there and then in the captain’s stateroom. If hoofing it out to the middle of nowhere, Indiana had been unbelievable, then what this woman had done bordered on the insane. This was a destroyer of the United States Navy on patrol in the Indian Ocean, purportedly hunting for the world’s most prolific pirate.

​ And there was an Avon Lady.

​ At the captain’s door.

​ I think that’s the first time I really and truly began questioning the sanity of everyone and everything around me. Cager. My chief. Stonerock and his painting. Whatever it was I’d witnessed in the Chief’s Mess. The captain. Hell, I even entertained the idea that I might be the one who’d cracked. Wouldn’t you? Everyone else on the ship, except maybe for Cager, seemed to be on the same page. The chiefs had all participated in the ceremony. No one seemed to bat an eye at the weird journey to Senior’s office. And everyone had seemed pretty upset about my opinion on the whole painting the ship thing.

​ I gulped.

​ “Um, yes, sir.”

​ “Well, be a gentleman and invite her in.” I could hear that weird tone in his voice. A resignation almost. Like when pap had finally admitted to my dad that the family tractor could no longer be fixed and it was time to put it out to pasture—literally—and go find a new one.

​ I stepped aside. “Come in, Ma’am?”

​ She smiled, probably twenty layers of thick, red lipstick caked on—some of it on her teeth—and fluttered one of her hands. “Ma’am? Why, aren’t you the perfect gentleman?” She came in, found a seat, and began setting up her little display case on the coffee table.

​ The captain eyeballed her for a moment or two and then looked up at Chief Sussley. “Now, Chief. Where were we?”

​ Chief Sussley cleared his throat. “We have a problem, sir. A complication that could compromise our current course with respect to the collection and capture of a certain scandalous scoundrel of the seas.”

​ I stood near the end of the couch—the Avon Lady had taken my seat—and watched the captain. He had this really thoughtful look on his face, like he was either trying to solve all the world’s problems or, at least, trying to make it look like that.

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