Historical Fiction
Date Published: March 12th
Publisher: Acorn Publishing
William Sukara, a gregarious dreamer, emerges from the 1950s an estranged son.
In divorce debt and with limited visitation rights as a father, he searches
for order in failure. Pursuing self-discipline as an answer, he enlists in the
Navy, volunteers for underwater demolition team training, and survives the
elite course.
With five other team members, he raises his hand for a clandestine mission,
knowing only that it’s a “hundred day operation in a warm climate.” They
are led by a mysterious civilian who alludes that their authorization comes
from the Oval Office, and they are to operate with extreme malice. They
revolt, escaping under bizarre circumstances.
The Helmsman of Anthesis is a raw, close to the nerve, psychological
thriller about a mission gone wantonly mad.
EXCERPT
To the east, molten first light flared into the chrome of sunup. It was going to be another fiery rebirthing along the desiccated coast. A dying offshore zephyr filled and failed an ethereal spinnaker. The bow-to-stern sail made the thirty-six-foot hull appear as though it were breathing. As the solar fire rose to flaunt its power, it colored the eight hundred square feet of nylon into a giant orange peel.
Standing in the sail’s shadow, the helmsman avoided its full rising wrath. Astern a squiggly scratch on a tin sea revealed a few knots of course progress. Luffing cloth coaxed the weathered hull along. Framed in a cerulean empire above and below, she pulsated over an idle Sea of Cortez.
As he held a creeping course toward a far sickle of sun-burnt hills, he romanced the curtain rising over the Sierra De La Giganta, a five-thousand-foot face now blushing with exposure. The Mountains of the Giantess were as naked as the helmsman. His faded safety harness exposed his immodesty to a revealing day.
Shaking his fuzzy head, tired of being tired of sailing up the Latin coast, he remembered he hadn’t spoken at length in English or Spanish for weeks. He was long overdue for a cup of percolated jump juice, as well as some face-to-face conviviality. He often considered his solitude; when his façade of being witnessed was long absent, how do you conduct yourself? To where would his errant mind wander?
He had anchored near solo sailors before, being audience to their cooking-over-a-candle stoicism and fervent loquaciousness. He monitored his own petty actions and eccentricities, cognizant of anyone going to sea by himself, and continuing alone, should be suspect. He also knew that another person’s habits and warts could turn a small boat into a prison. He had heard of a captain ordering a crew member off his boat for not burping Tupperware.
With little wind for self-steering to be put into slave-duty, he put the tiller amidships and went below. Pumping up a Primus, he got a flame going under a dented kettle. He reached for a rusty can that was innocuously labeled, KAHVE. He had offered a Panamanian trawler captain a Playboy magazine for it, receiving an enthusiastic, “Pornografia? Si.”
The tin’s writing was utterly illegible, its country of origin lost. A blurred logo was either a stylized gargoyle or skull and crossbones. Its hostile brew produced a heart-pounding, hand-trembling, eye-dilating affair.
“This stuff can jump-start a toe-tagged cadaver,” he had advised guests.
With a cup of serious caffeine, he climbed topside and back to rippling, indecisive sailcloth.
His sight returned to an inflamed mountain range a mile off in the slow promenade. Piercing deeper and deeper into the phantom haunts, the torching dawn wilted shade out of serpentine gorges. Held in stony silence, venues twisted down tiered citadels of rillstone, spilling out onto a flood plain of razor-armed flora. His thoughts again started to drift off course, heading toward past shoals.
An uneasy comparison surfaced. The helmsman’s thirty-four years of people’s dressage weren’t a pebble of concern to this implacable barrier. The massif could never feel the difference between sublime and tragic; rain and tears were synonymous. The billions of tons didn’t have to patch together unshakable meaning to veil an endless blank. Mountains offer transitions; humans possess heirs and an icy regularity of hope. Even when the defiant peaks erode down to the sea, they are imperceptibly uplifted in sedimentary reincarnation.
About the Author
At age twenty, Lee Hodiak joined the Navy and spent most of his enlistment
attached to Underwater Demolition Team 12. After serving, he joined the San
Diego Police Department but realized he needed to follow his passion for
wilderness travel and adventure instead. He went on to backpack the Baja
California Peninsula, built a thirty-six-foot sloop, and lived in Australia
for twenty years.
Now a resident of Central California, Lee enjoys
birdwatching and living by the ocean. Sixty years in the making, The Helmsman
of Anthesis is his debut novel.
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