Motorboat

I was driving out to Lake Vaughn with my sales guy Ernie behind the wheel towing his motorboat for an afternoon on the lake. It was a starkly beautiful day, dry, sunny, warm. I rolled down the window on my side and the wind roared in at the perfect temperature. I rolled the window back up and it was quiet. Ernie turned to me and started talking.

“This is my wife’s boat. She’s never going to see it again.”

I knew Ernie hated his wife, and they were going through an ugly divorce. We rode along in silence.

We got to the lake and backed up to the boat launch, launched the boat and got on board and motored out to the lake for a picture-perfect day on the water, water that was uncommonly almost unrealistically calm. It was like we were floating along the surface of a liquid mirror.

After tooling around a bit and maybe five miles offshore – this lake was enormous almost like a small sea – I noticed off in the distance in front of us and a bit to the right a boat that was towing some kind of barge or smaller boat or something… It was interesting enough to really get a good look. The boat was piloted by a man, and a woman was sitting next to him. There were three kids on the boat; a girl looking to be maybe sixteen; a younger boy; and a small girl. I assumed they were a family, but what was it that they were towing? The boat and barge were so white it almost hurt your eyes to stare at them.

While I stared, I noticed a large, rogue wave starting to develop in the distance behind them. It grew and grew until it must have been twenty-five feet tall. It smashed into them broadside, and they vanished beneath the water.

One by one they popped up to the surface; first, the man, the Dad; then Mom, then big sister; and then the boy. They swam over to the capsized boat and clung to the hull, but no small girl could be seen. Whatever it was they were towing was gone.

I told Ernie to steer over to where they had gone down. I jumped overboard, and swimming to the bottom of the lake, saw a girl face down on the bottom. She was wearing a pink sun dress, which I grabbed with my left hand and paddled up to the surface with my right hand. I gave her CPR as I swam over to where the family was clinging to the side of their capsized boat. By the time I got there, the girl had revived.

The mother and father glared at me with an expression somewhere between outrage and hatred. The wife snapped at me,

“You didn’t have to do that! When kids are at the bottom of a lake or swimming pool they’re only sleeping. They’ll wake up and swim to the surface.”

I deposited the kid next to her mom and dad and swam back to the motorboat and hauled myself on board. I took one last look at the family clinging to the hull of their bright white boat and turned around to see Ernie dousing our boat with gasoline. Then he lit it on fire. We jumped off the boat just as it was engulfed in flames and swam five miles back to shore. Then I woke up.

I was lying on my back in a hotel bed. My wife and I were on vacation in Washington state at the time. The room was dark, but I knew where I was right away. I don’t know about you, but whenever I have a disturbing or vivid dream, (or even a nightmare), immediately upon waking up, (even before becoming totally conscious), I think to myself:

“That wasn’t real, Uncle Joe’s been dead for ten years; or monsters aren’t real…”

In this case, my first thought was,

“That couldn’t have happened, I would never go boating with that jackass, Ernie.”

He was one of my contract sales guys when I had my engineering and manufacturing business in Arizona. He was the Orange County sales representative, and we had had a big falling out at a party one night. It was one of those drinking parties, and we were both shit-faced. This was back during the days of the Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he was bragging about all the money he was making off his clients who were basically making armaments for the war efforts. Gunrunners. Business was good. Very good.

That wasn’t the problem for me. It was when he started going on and on about how great it was the U.S. was bombing and murdering people overseas and he started going on about which other countries we should start bombing and invading next. Syria. Iran. Pakistan. He had a whole list, and he wouldn’t shut up about it. Listening to him talk, I felt an unsettling mix of disbelief and disgust. I was sickened that someone could discuss lethal violence with such callous nonchalance and everybody at the party seemed to be cool with his rap.

So, here’s what I did. While he was going on and on, I took a piece of graph paper and with the paper sideways I drew on half the paper a rough map of the Mediterranean and the surrounding countries: Spain, south of France, Italy, Aegen Sea, Greece the Levant, Turkey, North Africa, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Egypt. Then I shoved the paper over to my warmongering colleague and said,

“Here’s a map I started for you. I left half the page blank so you could draw in all the countries you want to invade.”

He had no idea what he was looking at and certainly had absolutely no idea where Syria or any of the countries even were on a map, but he was ready to bomb, to invade, and to kill. I made a big fool of him. He, of course, was very pissed off at me, but business is business, and we kept working together. He’d sell stuff, we’d build it, and I’d pay him a commission. I think over time he just forgot about it.

It must have been a year or so later that the wife and I got an invitation to his wedding to his second wife as he really did hate his first wife and divorced her. I didn’t know much about his new bride, but I knew from talking to him she had kids by a previous marriage. I also knew she smoked because he had mentioned something about her always having a cigarette when she did the laundry.

The ceremony was held at a wedding venue adjacent to the Pageant of the Masters site in Laguna Beach, California. The Pageant of the Masters is part of the artist community there, and people pose on elaborate sets in period costumes to recreate famous works of art. When we got there, we had an idea we were at the right place as they had huge paintings of the actors posing as paintings. It’s at or near the Irvine Bowl, and we had flown in for the wedding. By the time we got parked and figured out where to go we were running late, and things were well underway.

It was a small wedding, and there were three girls in the front row making a kind of ruckus throughout the ceremony The eldest was a teenager, the next oldest maybe ten or twelve and the youngest was well, younger. We later found out it was the brides’ kids. They were all dressed in light pink matching dresses, so they were maybe bridesmaids. It really wasn’t a ruckus, but noticeable. They were giggling rather loudly, pointing, whispering in each other’s ears, giggling more, pointing, and giggling throughout. That sort of thing. As soon as the ceremony was over, we shook all the appropriate hands, made all the nice mandatory comments and split.

It seems like these days it takes forever for kids to grow up.

Alan Olee, Tempe, Az (2025)