Carl followed the black guy below into the main cabin, addressing Gun on the way down, “Bull, Gun, you couldn’t hit a money-shot if your life depended on it!”

Old Jim laughed along with Carl and moved a short distance away to secure his gear. Then, Gun leaned over to tell me that Jim was 76, a former Petty Officer in the Navy who lost control of his bodily functions on the previous voyage and defecated here on the main deck. Why tell me such a thing? It was dismissed as an accident which Jim cleaned up right away and apologized for, but it was still an awful embarrassment, I’ll bet!

A couple seconds later a glass object smashed below deck, followed by rumbling which sounded like an all-out physical struggle between Carl and the other man, Killis.

“Hey-hey!” yelled Gun. “What’s going on down there?”

Carl re-emerged on deck, grinning, but there was a small cut on his arm. “That guy can’t take a joke. I just said he was the Brown Bomber!”

“Ignorant redneck!” came the black man’s voice from below deck. “I warned him not to call me that!”

Jimmy came over to check the cut on Carl’s big bicep, dismissing it as nothing.

Carl tried explaining to the rest of us, “That Killis guy, we were on another trip, he’s an ex-Navy SEAL…you know, a frogman, one of those Underwater Demolition guys. So, he’s, you know…a person of color. Just making a joke, that’s all.”

“Beat-down fool!” yelled the ex-frogman Killis.

“You’re too sensitive, you know that? You got a big anger problem there, pal,” Carl shouted back down the hatch.

Gun chimed in with a single loud strum of his guitar, and sang out in his best raspy voice, “War—what is it goo-od for?”

“It’s good for kicking ass where it needs to be kicked,” Jim answered in a crusty tone. He examined the razor-sharp barbs on his fishing hooks.

“War this, war that. You’re just an old War-head!” Gun joked. “You can’t kill every bad guy. Christ, we got bad leaders in this country.”

“Not all bad,” Jim declared, meeting Gun’s skeptical expression dead on.

Carl unsheathed a gleaming long knife and added with a smirk, “Oh, I don’t know. War is fine.” He twirled the knife in his palm like a toy. “As long as you got the biggest weapons in history!”

“Amen to that, brother!” shouted Jim, and he high-fived with Carl. “But don’t let anyone else have them. That’s where I disagree with these Washington Big Wigs, giving our weapons to bad guys who use them on us down the line.”

Gun got up quick. “Yeah. Even teaching foreign scientists to make nukes at places like MIT.” With his knee he shoved a cooler across the gritty deck in front of us, and laid on top with the guitar resting on his chest. Behind him, the refugee roundup continued but the authorities seemed to have it under control.

Jim blew dirt off a fishing hook, then he picked out another hook and compared their array of barbs. “All these ungrateful countries, they turn on us no matter what,” he said like he just couldn’t figure out why.

Carl drew a string of fancy fish lures from his tackle box. “That’s the nature of the beast,” he concluded. Each lure was eye-catching, made of tiny separate parts hinged together and shimmering. One by one he knocked sand particles and bits of dried bait off them. “Sure, America should keep their weapons to secure the homeland instead of trying to make a better world.”

“See, you’re right for once!” replied enthusiastic old Jim. “We don’t need anyone else. Even our economy’d be better off without worrying about the world.”

When Carl began to polish his intricate lures I could see that fish had Zero chance against these guys.

Gun plucked a few more guitar strings and remarked, “The Big Wigs don’t care. They just build better weapons to knock out the ones we sold off.”

“Fine!” Jim exclaimed again. “But don’t share our technology. And keep kicking ass now and then to keep everyone honest.”