Amanda

Amanda

By G. P. Muniak



Mike stood on the fantail of the USS Monterey. He looked out over the Atlantic Ocean as it expanded uninterrupted, in every direction, before silently spilling over the star-speckled horizon. The water brightly glistened under the largest blood-red full moon Mike had ever seen. Gentle swells rhythmically rose and fell around the ship and slowly rocked the vessel. The night was windless. The salty air teetered on the brink of boiling. Mike's dark blue coveralls were soaked in sweat, and they clung heavily to his chest and back. The dense humidity filled his lungs, making each deep breath feel labored and unsatisfying.



Mike was on lookout. He was a tall man in his early twenties with short black hair and bulky shoulders. His chin and neck were covered in nineteen hours of coarse stubble. The sun would be rising soon, and Mike had another two hours of watch to stand. Everything was quiet. There was hardly any wake as the ship made wide and lazy circles through the Caribbean waters of south Florida. The nor'easter of the coast of New York state was dissipating, and the ship's Captain expected orders by the next day to sail his vessel north. Even the radio clipped to Mike's belt remained mostly silent, with only the bare minimum message traffic being passed. Deployment was almost over, and thoughts of family, food, and the feel of American soil occupied the dreams of the sleeping crew.



There was energy in the air. It was something like friction, or a built up static charge. Mike blinked hard and rubbed his eyes. He looked at his wristwatch before stretching his arms out wide in the air. He groaned loudly as he stretched the muscles of his chest and then allowed his arms to flop down to his sides. That is when he heard the familiar sound of dolphins jumping playfully in the water beneath him. There had been three delicate splashes in almost simultaneous succession. Mike walked closer to the railing so he could look over the side and watch their acrobatics. He was patiently watching the water, waiting for them to jump again, when he heard a womanâs voice cut through the shadows behind him.



"Hello"



Mike whipped around, his hands held a little higher than usual in an instinctively defensive position. He could just see the silhouette of the person standing in the shadow of the superstructure.



"Holy fuck!" he said with a heavy sigh. Just what in the hell do you think you're, you're" He stammered and fell silent as he saw her step out of the shadows.



His vocabulary was suddenly reduced to just one word; flawless. Her skin was pale, without a single mole or blemish, or even so much as a freckle. Her thick, golden hair had been tied back into an intricate braid that hung all the way down to the back of her knees. Her lips were red, very red, large, puffy and inviting. All the features of her face were striking, but her eyes, he just couldnât look away from those eyes. They were large, bright, almond shaped eyes. Even under the stars and moonlight, they shone with the blue-green color of a tropical ocean boiled down and condensed into two tiny points of enchanting brilliance.

She caught his mesmerized gaze, held it intently, and gave a warm, closed-mouth smile. He felt like he was falling. He took one quick, unsteady, quarter-step backwards to regain his balance.



"I apologize if I scared you," she said with a giggle as she covered her mouth with a delicate hand. "I did not mean to."



"Oh no, no," Mike said. "I was kind of daydreaming andâ¦and, you just startled me for a second, that's all. I didn't realize anyone else was out here."



"Well, here I am Sir, and here you are, all alone, together," she said as she gracefully walked up beside him. Mike watched her body as she moved. There was something seductive, and even predatory. She didn't just walk. She prowled. It made Mike think of a shark. She never lost the smirk on her face, and she never broke eye contact. She placed her elbows on the railing next to Mike with her legs slightly spread, arching her back and ever so slightly thrusting her chest and butt out.



She was wearing the faded and worn olive-green coveralls of a U.S. Navy air-crewmen. Even though they were about two sizes too large for her, they were damp with what Mike assumed was sweat, and so they hung off her shoulders and down her body heavily, giving Mike an intriguing estimation of what was underneath.



Mike suddenly realized that he was looking up and down her body in an obviously lecherous way. He shot a quick glance up to her face to see if she had noticed. She definitely noticed. She had been looking at his eyes the entire time, and she responded with an even wider smile.



Mike tried to play it cool. "You know, they move the smoke-pit to the forward break at night," he said stupidly. "If you came out here to smoke."



"Thank you," she said, "but I did not come here to smoke."



"So then, what's up? Why did you come out here?" Mike asked.



She shrugged her shoulders before replying "Companionship," and then she shifted so close to Mike that the sides of her firm thighs were rubbing against his.



Mike could smell her then. He instinctively inched his face closer as the primal portion of his brain worked to dissect the smell of her skin. It was a subtle, complex, and multilayered scent. First, there was the smell of the ocean, like the distant smell of a raw bar or a bay at low tide. The second note was powerfully sweet, like flowers or fruit. The last note, buried by the first two, was almost undetectable. It was sour. Later, Mike would realize that it smelled like aging meat. He sudden realized that they were again surrounded by silence. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again after deciding a compliment to her perfume would be far too obvious.



"Have you been on board long?" Mike asked to break the silence, even though he already knew the answer. She must have been dropped off during the helicopter operations yesterday afternoon. On a warship, a girl like her doesnât stay unnoticed for long. Mike was surprised he had not heard about her already.



"I just got on board," she said. "My name is Amanda. What is your name?"



"Mike," he replied.



"Michael?" she said. "I have always liked the name Michael. It is a pleasure to meet you Michael. Have you been on board long?"



"Yeah," Mike said, "way too long. We've been away for nine months now. You're lucky you missed it. I think we spent a total of maybe 17 days in port. It's my third deployment, but this one was a serious bitch compared to the other two."



She pouted melodramatically. "Oh, how awful, I bet you really miss your family. You have a wife and children waiting for you at home, do you not? Or a lover, maybe?" The phrasing of the question was so strange that Mike nearly overlooked its personal nature and unprofessional directness. Mike realized that there was something very weird about the woman. What she said and how she said it, even her movement and expressions all seemed just a little off. He figured she was probably foreign, Israeli or White South African or something not really common in the Navy. Or maybe she was just a little crazy. Mike remembered a high school buddy who would only date unstable women. He would explain, "The crazy ones always, ALWAYS, fuck the best."



"Well, no," Mike tried to formulate a response, "Not exactly. I've got an ex-wife and a four-year-old son named Frank. She took the kid with her to California two years ago. I only get to see him on the occasional holidays or if I can get a week or two off work. I plan on trying to get orders out there for shore duty so I can see him every weekend."



She became visibly excited as he said this. "You have a son?" she exclaimed. "I bet he is so handsome, just like his father. Your wife must be raving mad to leave such a strong, virile man." She put her hot, wet hand on top of Mike's forearm as she spoke. Mike could see a bead of sweat forming on her forehead in the moonlight. He watched as it slowly rolled down her cheek, and then her neck, and then over her collarbone, and then as it disappeared down into her coveralls. Mike suddenly realized how turned on he was as her body heat, her sweat, and her smell awakened a deep, primal need.



"It must be so hard for you," she said, now practically whispering in his ear. "It must be so hard being without a woman for so long, especially being so young, so strong, so masculine. Michael, can I tell you something?"

Mike nodded his head as she continued. "I have never been with a man before. If I were to bring you home, I would never let you go. I would take care of you. I would make you very, very, happy. You would be my first Michael. I will not disappoint you. All you need to do is come home with me."



She was inches away from his face then, and she had the look of a woman with an intense, overpowering thirst. She leaned in quickly and gave Mike a long hard kiss, penetrating his mouth with her tongue. She tasted salty, very salty. She moaned gently as she covertly wrapped her arm around his waist while the other slowly moved to wrap her fingers around his quickly hardening dick.



Mike was not a stupid man. He was well aware that he was being seduced, as entirely surreal and unbelievable as it was. Most women considered him attractive, but he had never been hit on like that before. He was starting to feel like he had just stumbled into a porno. Mike wondered for a moment if it was a set up, like one of his buddies was hiding out in the darkness with a night-vision camera and having the laugh of his life. But at that point, in that moment, he just didn't care. Sure, this incredibly hot woman was probably crazy as all hell, and this could end his Naval career in an instant, but fuck it. If this weird, crazy, outrageously sexy woman wanted his dick that desperately, then she was going to get it. It had been far too long since the last time he'd gotten it in. His cock felt like a hot iron spike and was begging for release. He was going to fuck that crazy slut right there on the deck.



That is when he heard the scream from somewhere up mid-ship, and the splash of a four hundred pound man's twenty-foot belly flop. Man overboards were the biggest reason for lookouts, so that someone would be there to sound the alarm if a sailor falls, or jumps, into the water. Mike acted immediately. Amanda tried to keep her arm around him with surprising strength. He had to pick her up and throw her to get her off of him. He ran to the other side of the ship where he saw a man thrashing around and yelling in the water. He took his radio from off of his belt and called away the man overboard. When Mike turned to grab the life-ring from its rigging, he saw that Amanda was gone. Mike could hear his heart beating in his ears as he threw the life-ring out into the moonlit ocean. He managed to through the life-ring so hard that he nearly hit the drowning man on the back of his head.

Mike kept his eyes on the man, careful to track his movements through the water as he drifted farther and farther behind the ship. The victim clung to the life-ring, but he continued to struggle violently as he dipped under the ocean's swells. It was getting harder and harder for Mike to see, but he could have sworn he saw two, or maybe even three, figures emerge from the water and climb on top of the man as he twisted in the water, kicking with both legs and desperately slamming into the water with his right hand. The man's screams cut across the water. The eastern sky began to turn blue moments before the sun's orange rays crept over the horizon, and the man finally settled, resting still and exhausted on top his ring in the early morning silence.



It took just under thirteen minutes to recover the man from the water. Mike found out later that he was a sailor named Stevens, and that when they pulled him out of the water he was covered in bruises and lacerations, and he was missing a large chunk of flesh from his right calf. The official explanation was small sharks, very common in tropical waters, but the rescue swimmer who pulled Stevens out of the water said he kept rambling incoherently about "the women" that tried to drown him.



Mike had known Stevens for years, and he went to the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth the day after pulling in to visit him. At first, Stevens had told Mike a story about watching some dolphins on the quarterdeck and then slipping and falling into the water. Only after Mike had told him about Amanda did Stevens finally tell the true story of what happened to him that night.



"I was snuck by this woman. She was so hot, I mean, fucking Victoria's Secret hot. I had never seen her before, but we were talking and she was coming on to me hard, just like the other one was doing with you. When she got a hold of me she threw me in the water. I must have weighed a hundred pounds more than her, but she had tackled me like an NFL linebacker. Then, her and the others, they all tried to drown me. They came up from underneath me, from the water. One of them was naked Mike, tits flopping around all over the place and shit. And do you know what else was weird? The bitch that threw me overboard, she was wearing the wrong uniform. She was wearing the old dungarees, you know, the ones the sailors are wearing in the really old training videos.

They tried to take me under Mike, and they almost did. The harder I fought them, the harder they kept coming. I had to stab at them with my Boatswainâs punch. I just kept stabbing at their heads and necks. Thatâs when they started clawing, and biting. They were just so fucking fast in the water. I was getting so tired, and then, just when I thought they were going to get me, they disappeared down into the water. Listen Mike, donât tell anyone what you saw that night. They won't believe you. They're getting ready to kick me out. They're claiming PTSD. Fucking PTSD, do you believe that shit?"



The day after the incident, Mike had asked nonchalantly about the new blond female on board, and no one had any idea who he was talking about. As the months went by, he started to wonder if he had somehow fallen asleep while standing and just dreamed the whole sexually charged encounter. He was doing his best to just forget the whole thing. But then, one night, he saw her again. This time, he knew for sure he was dreaming.

She had gotten him into the water where he was outnumbered and overpowered. Clawing and scratching, they dragged him deeper and deeper down into their dark, wet world, until his chest imploded, releasing the last breath of vital oxygen from his lungs in the form of a voiceless scream. He breathed the water in, tasting of salt and silt, burning his windpipe and making him choke and panic. He struggled frantically for his life, desperately needing air, and still they pulled him down deeper, slowly, steadily. Amanda had the same seductive smile across her beautiful face. She was taking him to her home. And that is when Mike saw it clearly in his dream, a forgotten memory picked from his subconscious.



He sat up in his bed, hyperventilating, with the image clear in his mind. The nametape on her coveralls had read MITCHEL. A soon as his heart beat slowed, Mike grabbed his laptop from the nightstand. First, he Googled "Amanda Mitchel", but he didn't find anything useful, and then "US sailor Mitchel" and then "Airman Mitchel." Still, there was nothing that pointed to the girl. Then, on a hunch, he searched for "lost at sea Mitchel." Within the first five hits he found it, a news story about a nighttime helicopter crash off the cost of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, back in 2002. Four of the five crewmembers had been recovered from the water. The name of the man they lost, was Mitchel. Mike knew it was probably a coincidence, but something in his gut told him there was a connection between the crash and the mystery woman he had met.



Mike stuck to the plan and told no one about his experience. Even when he sat around with other sailors, and they were all getting into pissing contests over who could tell the weirdest sea-stories, like UFO and Ghost stories, Mike would only sit and listen. That is, until he went home to his parent's for Christmas.



He and his father had been drinking since eleven AM. They had polished off a twenty-four pack of beer and were almost through a handle of whiskey. They were on the couch, watching late-night sports highlights on ESPN. Mike's father was a retired sailor himself. More specifically, he had once been a Chief Boatswainâs Mate. He loved to remind people that it was "The oldest rate in the Navy." He had spent a large chunk of his retirement fishing and watching TV. He loved the programming on the History Channel, especially their series about major wars and nautical history.



Mike can't remember why he told his father the story, but he did. He had expected his father, a legendary ball-buster, to ridicule him, or at least poke some fun at him, but he didn't. Instead, after Mike had finished his story, his father only sat there for a contemplative moment with his hairy arms folded across his chest like a meditative gorilla. Then he scratched the side of his head and said, somewhat slurred, "mermaid."



"What," Mike said, almost laughing in the old man's drunken face.



"I said mermaid," his father repeated resolutely. "You had a run in with a mermaid."



"Like from the fucking cartoons?" Mike spat. "Pop, are you going senile. She didn't have any fins. Trust me, she was 100% woman."



"No, no," his father said. "Not like from the fucking cartoons. Now listen for a second. That is a very new way of thinking about very old legends. In the old stories, mermaids were never cute. They were evil, deceptive little bitches. They would lure men to their watery death. They trick them, or hypnotize them, or whatever. Some believed they ate the sailors, some say they mated with them before they killed them, and some say they drowned them just for shits and giggles. But in all the old legends, those sailors never came back. The Greeks and Romans believed they were related to the Sirens. They had the same father god, Poseidon I think, or maybe Zeus. I forget.



The sirens were three beautiful women on a deserted island. They would sing this enchanted song. When sailors heard the song they would immediately fall in love, and they had to hear more. As they sailed closer, CRASH, their ship would be smashed to pieces on the rocks and they'd be dead or stranded on the beach where these same three beautiful women would finish them off.



So, what I'm saying is… that you almost fucked a fish and became some kind of man-sushi in the process."

They both erupted with uncontrolable laughter.



"It's a good thing they got the other guy first," his father finally said between outbursts of laughter.



"Don't be so sure," said Mike. "You didn't see the fish," and he moved his two hands through the air to display the shape of an hourglass. "Besides, it couldn't have been any worse then dealing with my Ex."



They were laughing so hard they nearly cried. The subject had then turned towards the topic of Mike's son, Frank. Neither man gave mermaids another thought and soon crawled up the stairs to lie in their beds and watch the world do cartwheels.



They were both sailors, and so they both knew how to forget when they wanted to. There were plenty of things that could kill a man at sea. It didn't really matter what had happened. The sea and home were two entirely different worlds, and Mike was home, and safe. But still, before returning back to his command, Mike had bought himself his own Christmas gift. It was a Ka-Bar combat knife, really more like a machete than a knife, in a Crocodile Dundee sort of way. It was way bigger then anything Mike would actually need to do his job and about two inches out of Navy regulations. Mike kept this knife attached to his belt whenever underway. He named the knife Amanda.