Scatalogical Pistol

So it's 1993, and I'm running chief on the M/V Rusty Flowers. This had been my regular ride since early 1988 after the Valley Transporter had burned, and I had been fortunate enough to hang on to the regular chief's slot on there after ACBL had bought Valley Line in July of 1992.

At this time, the regular cook on the Rusty was a guy named Jeff. He was a big, tall dude, and in a prior life, he had been a Navy Seal. Jeff was a little on the crazy side (expected, considering his background), one of his favorite stunts was to use large amounts of gasoline to light our homemade BBQ grill. He used enough that it always went up with a big WHOOSH!, with flames as high as the second deck, and there was a big sooty smudge on the white paint of the deckhouse up to the second deck from these antics.

We were sitting in the galley one afternoon trading stories, and Jeff was telling me about one he was directly involved in, one that concerned a captain named Windy Howard. Windy's fame had preceded the telling of this tale; after ACBL bought us, various crew members would relate tales of Windy's “exploits”.

To wit, here's three, just for background.

Deck crews hated working for him. Hated working for him, hated him. One of his favorite things while building tow was to arrange the barges so all the cover tops were matched by color instead of by tonnage and where they were to be dropped. He would build tow this way even if it meant that that barge in the middle of the tow had to be dropped ten miles up the river. He would even do it in the winter, in the ice of the Illinois River, when the weather and the ice make everything done on tow much, much harder and more miserable.

He had been detained at O'Hare Airport by security once while on his way to the boat for impersonating a naval officer. He was on his way to work, and he was dressed in the khakis and full insignia of a captain in the US Navy, and he was not, and never had been an officer in the navy. A real naval officer spotted him and struck up a conversation, and it didn't take him any time at all to figure out that he was talking to someone who was only dressed like a naval officer. He promptly reported Windy to security, who hauled him away for a little question and answer session. In the course of this, the office was called. They vouched for who he really was, and he was let go on the condition that it would never happen again.

My mother even knew about this clown, even though she didn't know his name. Mom lived on the South Side of Ottawa, Illinois, a block back from the top of the south bluff of the valley. She had a scanner at home and liked to listen to the marine traffic as both I and my brother-in-law worked on the river. Windy was the regular captain on the Thurston B. Morton, and during the bitterly cold winter of 1976 – 1977, the Morton spent a stretch laid up in the ice near Marseilles, Illinois. Anyway, mom hears the Morton making a radiophone call to the office one morning, on marine channel 26, the Ottawa operator. The captain was calling to tell the office that the whole crew, including the chief engineer, had jumped boat in the middle of the night, leaving him alone on the boat! You have to be an enormous jerk for things to go this far, even back then before Human Resources (ever think of how cannibalistic that sounds?) had sway over everything. This was the only instance of the whole crew going that I ever heard of. He was whining to the person on the other end of the call, “I don't know what happened! I don't know why they would do me this way!” And the person he was crying to in Jeffersonville replied tartly, “As I recall, this isn't the first time that this has happened with you, is it!?” Mom said that there was a mumbled reply that she couldn't decipher. The call ended shortly after that exchange.

Now that the stage is set, on with Jeff's tale. He was cooking on the Thurston B., and Windy was home on days off. The crew had been talking about it for a while, and they had decided that a gas grill would be a nice addition to the boat. They had pooled their money, about $200, and bought a grill through the boat store, and it had been on the boat long enough to see some use but was still basically new. The relief captain went home for his days off, and Windy came back. While taking a walk around the outside of the boat, he came upon the new gas grill sitting outside the galley door, and he promptly kicked it in the river!

Why? Who knows. Likely because if he didn't approve of it, nobody was going to have it. No matter what his flawed reasoning was, this was an action that once again, infuriated the entire crew. After all, this was their pooled funds, and they had only had very few meals from it! Their reaction was entirely understandable.

A few days after The Almighty Kick, the after watch deckhands were in the galley talking with Jeff, expressing their anger at the whole episode. Jeff had a flash of Seal-inspired skullduggery and asked the guys if they would like to get revenge on Windy for the grill.

”Oh HELL Yes!”, was the reply.

So he sat the two of them down and laid out a plan. Windy and Jeff were due off the boat when it got to Saint Louis in a few days. Jeff rummaged around in the pantry, and handed a roll of heavy duty aluminum foil over to one of the guys, and told him that the next time he had to use “the facilities”, to do his business on a big piece of the foil, wrap it up tightly, and then to bring it back when nobody was around.

By the next afternoon, the deed was done, and they brought “the packet” back to Jeff. He wrapped a few more layers of foil around it, and then he smooshed it around until it was roughly in the shape of a pistol. He put it in a paper bag and told them that when crew change came around, one deckhand should distract Windy, and get him away from his briefcase. At this point, his partner was to slip the ersatz “pistol” into the captain's briefcase and go far away.

They docked at ACBL's St. Louis shop that afternoon, and Windy and Jeff caught a cab to the airport. Windy's flight left first, Jeff's a couple of hours later, so Windy headed straight to security. Now this happened in early January of 1991, and Operation Desert Shield was going to turn into Operation Desert Storm before the end of the month, so airport security was ramping up with each passing day, and Windy Howard had no idea of what he was about to walk into.

Jeff said that he followed him at a distance, and hung back a good bit away from the security checkpoint, but where he could still see what was going on. Windy put his coat and briefcase on the belt of the x-ray machine, and got wanded through with no problem, and was waiting on his stuff at the far end of the x-ray station, when all of a sudden, three more security types hustled over to look at the machine's monitor with the first guy. They all looked at the monitor, and then at each other. Words were being exchanged, but it was too far away to hear what was going on, Jeff said. The group approached Windy and asked if they could look in his briefcase. He said OK, and one of them opened it up and was shuffling the contents around, till he found what he was looking for. Jeff had sidled over nearer, so he could hear what was going on. The security guy was holding the “pistol” by the “barrel” with his thumb and first finger, and it was visibly deforming where he held it. He said to Windy, “OK, cowboy. How about you unwrap this for us?” Jeff said that Windy then took it and that you could tell by the look on his face that he had absolutely no idea what this thing was or where it had come from. He started unwrapping it and had gotten three or four layers of the foil off when the smell escaped. The boss said loudly, “STOP! STOP! Don't unwrap any more of that! Come on mister, you're coming with us!” Windy said, “But my flight is boarding!” “It doesn't matter. You're coming with us.” And they hustled him off in the middle of a security phalanx, not to be seen before Jeff's flight left.

The two of us have been sitting in the galley while he told this, I'm laughing, he's smiling. “So, what was the outcome on this?”, I asked. He said, “Don't know. Nobody ever heard a thing, and the next time Windy caught the boat, he acted like nothing had ever happened, except for looking daggers at everybody on board for a while. It was beautiful.”