Free Flotilla by Daniel Haight

woman scream and start laughing - I pounded on that door like I was on the inside of a burning house. "Com'on, man!" Riley's response was to turn up the music louder.
    This naturally attracted everyone on board and I'm sure a few out on the Colony, too. I've never been more humiliated in my life. Finally after a minute he opened the door and I could go inside. I screamed and swore at him while I dressed but he was laughing too hard to really notice. Riley was decent enough to pay me the fifty bucks which I had more than earned. The crowd outside was laughing, too; it was the best joke they'd had all month.
    When Riley rolled up the doors again - a great cheer rose up in the crowd. At that moment, there was nothing else for me to do but raise my arms up like a champion boxer and take a bow. They cheered some more ... my butt was certainly getting a lot of attention out here.
    Jeb, on the other hand, wasn't amused. He fired me for 'gross insubordination' or something. Dad was kind of mad at Jeb but more so at me. "When we've got a thing going, I don't need you drawing attention to us," he said.
    "Thing?" I asked. "What 'thing'?"
    "Never mind," he grumbled and that was the last I heard of it. Later, Riley told me that Jeb's friend, Virgil, had heard about the incident and was threatening to pull his money out. Dad had to go over there and calm him down. It sounded like a big problem but I still didn't know what it was all about. Business deal? Scam?
    At first I felt guilty, but then I decided not to worry about it. Dad's scams were his business - when he wanted to cut me in on the action and tell me what was going on, I'd be more careful. I told him as much and his response was to make me sleep on the upper deck out in the cold air.

    The next day Riley came by and told me how the girls were asking about me. When I told him about being fired, he waved it off. "You don't need Jeb," he said. "I'll get you some more hours at the Range." Miguel was a second-second cousin to Riley ... his farts were horrific but he was turning out to be a gold mine.

    With my increased notoriety, the day jobs started rolling in. I started doing some gardening work for Gramma Alice. Like Marie, grew hydroponic vegetables on board the Green Thumb but she also grew fish on the E-Ring like we did. Some people said she had something to do with the old Hippy days but I never knew what. She was always out there working her rows of veggies and fruit and wearing a big, floppy sun hat. Our deal was for whatever she was growing - I never saw a dime. Out here, vegetables are almost worth their weight in gold.
    Gramma Alice always had an air of mystery around her. The rumor was that she maintained a pot grow house. She would get visited all the time by Pac Fisheries, the Coast Guard and the DEA whenever they had an excuse. She always came back clean as a whistle ... she was always polite and never had a problem.
    They pulled a surprise inspection on her one morning when I was due to go over there. I spent an hour cooling my heels on the dock outside until the Security guys in their yellow windbreakers finished looking for whatever they thought she had. She was always sunny and cordial ... to their faces, anyway.
    As far as the Pac Fish employees - it was very much an 'Us vs. Them' kind of thing. The official employees of Pac Fisheries lived on the Phoenix and certain designated craft nearby. Some of them were pretty cool and others acted like the cranky managers of an RV campground. Part of that came from the memos out of corporate and it was up to them to decide how broadly they were to be interpreted. Some of the Pac Fish people were willing to put the hammer down rather than lose their job. It would have been the height of embarrassment to lose your job and then contract to come back out and work as one of the people you were in charge of only a few months before. So there was a sense of following the letter of the law and that made the relationship between the