Taking Aim

by Michael Cart

  Instead, the lady had to point out the absurdity of someone as obviously all wrong as me demanding proper barbecue, in a place like this, on a day like this. And that if I was really thinking about whatever the “real world” might be (I probably needed to stop referring like some expert to a world I had never even seen photos of), I should probably disembark at Lundy Lee, start walking south, and continue walking, forever.

  That was when the reverend invited us to sit with him.

  “Aw, don’t be a grouch,” he said as I took a seat and stared back in the direction of the service counter. “That was pretty funny.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Pristine said, defending me the way I dreamed she always would, now and forever, amen.

  “This is Pristine,” I said. “She loves me and we’re almost married.”

  “Well, almost congratulations then,” he said, reaching across the table and shaking her hand.

  She slightly turned on him. “What about you? Are you funny, too? Mister whatever your name is?”

  “I am not funny,” he said. “Not in the way you are implying. And my name is Reverend St. Paul. But I’m not big on formality, so you can just call me Saul.”

  Pristine turned then, all shark teeth and smiley yet scary like I had never seen in all the weeks we’d known each other. “Gussie, you gotta be smarter than this. That’s not his name. Reverend Saul St. Paul? Who has a name like that? If a person’s name sounds like a fake, then the person is probably a fake and who knows whatever real he’s hiding? What else don’t you know that everybody else knows?”

  It was as if the spirit of the boat that I always came to for sea breeze and peace was deciding to jerk me every which way today. Then it got all mocking, I guess because I had the nerve to think I had the same rights to get happy and married and maybe even unvirginated like every damn body else. I felt like the Lucky Buoy, the first friend I made here, was now joining the same old bunch who took what was precious to me and waved it above my head where I couldn’t reach.

  “There’s no need to talk to him like that,” he said in my defense. If I didn’t know better I’d think they were fighting over me. I wished I didn’t know better.

  “And there’s no need for you to talk to him like anything anymore, Saint Reverend, Saul Paul, because now he’s married to me.”

  “We’re not married, though,” I said sheepishly. A sheep on a boat. That was me, perfectly me. “Remember, I got that all screwed up and the captain doesn’t do that business?”

  “Ah, that doesn’t even matter,” Pristine said, swatting her hand in the direction of Captain No-Can-Do, now navigating us into port.

  “I’ll marry you,” the Reverend St. Paul said, kinda saintly.

  “Why would I want to marry you?” Pristine said. “I only said yes to this guy after he asked me twenty-five times.”

  “In only three days,” I said proudly.

  Pristine shook her head in her way, that way, that violent whiplashing with the squint and the wince that said everything’s all crazy anyhow so what the fuck to whatever. That was the look that first changed my everything, for the better and for forever.

  “I meant,” Reverend St. Paul said patiently, “I could perform the service.”

  “So, what, you have your own boat?”

  “Ah, no, I have a church. A small church, small congregation, but still it’s—”

  “What?” She looked at me quizzically. “Why didn’t you start with this guy in the first place then?”

  She already knew more about the man than I did.

  “Because it never even occurred to me he might be a real minister. That’s the way people seem to be around Lundy Lee. Making stuff up as they go along, which is mostly all right with me. But I thought he called himself ‘reverend’ the way another guy might call himself ‘colonel’ or ‘the governor’ or ‘ace.’ You’re not expected to go around believing people all over the place, are you? I’d look like a dope. Anyway getting married on the water was my dream. I grew up so far away from the water, and now here we are, right on top of it. Remember, Pristine, I told you all about my dream and the water and you and everything? Remember?”

  She was doing it again, the look, as if she honestly had to work any harder to make me crazy love her more than I already did.

  “Just kinda came up with that ‘colonel-governor-ace,’ choose-your-own-adventure idea all on your own, didja?” she said, brushing past the Reverend St. Paul and laying a big crushing hug on the very non-reverend Gus Glendower.

  “I did,” I said as triumphantly as I could with the air all crushed out of my lungs.

  “Gussie,” she said, “you are so damn delicious you don’t even know it. How did you ever make it all the way to eighteen years of age with that stuff playing around in your head while you’re supposed to be making important everyday decisions like crossing streets and swallowing and shit like that?”

  “I don’t know, baby, but I’m pretty sure my luck was running out on that kind of danger stuff. Then you flew in like a magic I-don’t-know-what at just the time to save me from myself. Now I have you to look after me. And all I ever needed was you, even before I knew there was a you, anyway. So I have everything I ever needed, don’t I? Who else you know can say that, huh?”

  “Nobody, sweetie,” she said, squeezing my face like she was trying to shape it into a regular symmetrical face with proper nostril sizes and nerve function and all that. “Nobody, nobody, nobody.”

  I was standing by, just happy because it was gonna work out, as we bumped into the dock. Reverend St. Paul and Pristine were talking over finer points of how weddings are supposed to work, but I was only half listening, playing with the rings in my pocket because they were back in the game now and I could swear they were actually heating up in there. I was not realizing my dream of a wedding at sea, but I was this close to the even finer dream. When I next stepped onto the Lucky Buoy as the guy who was married to the prettiest passenger they ever carried.

  “. . . Of course not, Reverend. For God’s sake, I didn’t even know I was getting married when I got on the boat. I should probably be asking you the same thing. Do you have a license to marry?”

  Oh, jeez, Charlie Waters Junior. I totally forgot.

  There he was, right there on the dock, waving and grinning and hooting and kind of dressed up for something fancy. I wave back.

  How it was supposed to go was, Pristine and me would go out and get all married up romantic style, trip out to the Big Island and then right back again. Then, Charlie and whoever else of the guys I invited from work could bring their collagen-cased asses down and we’d make the whole trip again, only a party this time, a reception. But in all the what-all, I forgot.

  “. . . Well, yes and no,” Reverend St. Paul was saying.

  “Well, so what, it’s not that kind of wedding, anyway. It’s between me and Gussie and our hearts and that makes it real,” Pristine was saying.

  “Hey-hey, Charlie!” I called, coming down the ramp to meet him before he could come up it to meet me.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, shaking my hand while I looked all around to see who else had come.

  “Change of venue,” I said, scanning the crowd of people gathering to either greet the arrival or join the departure. I didn’t recognize anybody. Bunch of sausages.

  “Hey,” Charlie said, and snapped his fingers in front of my face.

  “Sorry,” I said, looking him straight on. I noticed then he wasn’t alone. “You brought a date? Did I say you could bring a date along?”

  Folks were brushing past us on their way into—or more likely through—Lundy Lee. The clouds were starting to clear and the air was getting nice and fresh and the numbers lining up for the next trip out to the Big Island were way more than the ones coming back. That was supposed to be my party boat.

  “What?” Charlie Waters Junior said, practically laughing in my face. I hated that on a regular day, never mind my, my big day. “First, Gus, it’s a freakin’
ferry. Nobody needs your permission to ride it as long as they got the fare. Second, Warren isn’t a date, he’s my friend.”

  “Hi,” Warren said, leaning in and shaking my hand. “And congratulations. You must be really happy.”

  I shook his hand, and it was like having somebody shake you up out of a sleep or something.

  What was I getting mad about? Why was I being stupid? What a nice guy this Warren guy was, shaking my hand here on my big day. He even had the gift-wrapped package under his other arm.

  “Thank you, Warren. I am, actually. Really, really happy.” I felt Pristine bump right up against me from behind as the last of the arrivals showed. “And this is why,” I said, spinning around to present my bride to my guests in the proudest damn moment of my life.

  Pride, funny enough, was the thing that almost kept me from ever meeting Charlie Waters Junior in the first place. He was the proprietor of his own thriving business despite being barely out of school himself, because his father died and before that his mother ran away and so there he was behind the counter of Bread and Waters Loans all by himself.

  He must have seen me through the front window over and over again as I passed by about five hundred times while I scrambled over every inch of Lundy Lee when I was looking for wedding rings to get married to Pristine. Stupid me, I didn’t figure that a place like the Lee wouldn’t be exactly bursting with jewelry shops or wherever else rings might come from. I went to work on the bus that ran between my building and the factory and I came back on that same bus. I found places where I could get food that didn’t smell so strong I couldn’t take it back to my room without my landlady coming and chucking it all out into the alley again. And I found the pier that got me on the Lucky Buoy, and boy, that was all I thought I would need.

  But then I found Pristine on the Buoy and I found I had other needs. Like rings. So I had to get to know the town better, and it was plain stupid prejudice that allowed me to keep walking past Charlie’s place without taking so much as a peekaboo past the grating and through the glass into the reality of what actually transpired inside Bread and Waters Loans.

  It was worse than stupid because it was stupid with pride. That was the thing, with my mom, that she told me constantly. That as bad as any sin is in its own right, there wasn’t a single one that wasn’t made worse when you swirled pride into the mix. Should’ve said in its own wrong, was what I thought now. Since they were sins, in their own wrong. Rather than right. That would be more correct and funnier. Ha. Never thought of that when my mom was saying it, only now. She never saw the humor in being funny, anyhow.

  She was right, though. I was stupid with pride, not going into Bread and Waters Loans just because I was a man of means with a respectable job and money in his pocket and no need for a loan from such a place as this, some scrubby old pawnshop. Must’ve been where the pride came from because I never had it before. Money, I mean. Though pride I mean, as well, come to think of it ’cause I never had that, either.

  But pride led to desperation, just like my mom said it would, and I could not find a wedding ring in the whole of Lundy Lee and so I stepped through the door of Charlie Waters Junior’s establishment to finally see what the place was offering.

  It was offering stuff. The place was crammed with all manner of stuff you could ever imagine.

  “Can I help you, my man?” Charlie Waters Junior said when I walked toward him while spinning around to see all the stuff, ugly paintings of misshapen dogs and horses, old heavy brown suits and pale gowns in cellophane bags, creepy antique dolls with mange and chunks missing from their porcelain skulls.

  “Yes, I’m getting married,” I said, finally bumping right into the counter.

  “Really?” he said. I had encountered fake surprise before, and this wasn’t it.

  “Yes,” I said firmly, and with the right kind of pride that my mother could either approve of or just suck on it. “And I’m looking for some rings. Do you have any rings? Any nice rings?”

  He had been leaning on his elbows on the counter, making him just a bit above eye level for me. He straightened up stiffly and stared down. Way down.

  “Of course I do,” Charlie Waters Junior said. “Loads of rings and all of them nice. This is the first place folks think about when they have a nice ring and a liquidity problem. But before I go to the nice rings drawer, you should know that we accept cash, and, ah, more cash.”

  It was that special swirl of pride and stupidity that made me carry over three months’ salary, including second-shift overtime pay, stuffed into my pockets. But whatever it was, I felt nothing wrong at all when I pulled bunches of the stuff out in both hands and showed it to Charlie Waters Junior’s bulging eyes.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess I’m gonna pull out the real nice rings drawer.”

  That nice, nothing-wrong feeling didn’t subside at all as he turned to the big wall of dark wood drawers behind him and I eased my money back into my warm pockets. He cursed and growled some as the drawer stuck and tried not to open. They fought it out long enough for my eyes and attention to wander up and over to a different item altogether from what I came for.

  “You sell guns?” I said, knowing full well he did because I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

  “I know this place,” Pristine said as we turned the last big sweeping bend of the shore road that had been growing grottier with every step. I found this statement a little alarming.

  I had never been anywhere near this particular outer limit of the Lee front, and it made the rest of the town look something like affluent. Abandoned, rotting shacks and boardinghouses stood all along the road except for where they had fallen down completely. There were no people immediately visible, adding a lot to the apocalypsey sensation. This stretch even had its own smell, like if fish could sweat, this would be the result.

  If the dark underbelly of the world had its own seaside resort, this was the place.

  “You don’t know this place,” I said, hoping or forcing it to be the case.

  “Sure, there it is, the Salvation Army Citadel, right there. They were very good to me one time when I really needed it.”

  It was the only stone structure on the front, and looked like a headstone for everything else.

  “Well, now it’s the Star of the Sea Church,” Reverend St. Paul said as he led our little wedding procession up the wildly uneven flagstone path to the entrance. Pristine followed the reverend, then myself, Charlie Waters Junior, and Warren.

  “SOS,” I joked. “That seems about right.”

  Pristine whipped around to lay an angry shush on me. An angry, smoky shush.

  “Baby, you know I don’t like it when you smoke,” I said. “Take it from somebody with a funky heart. You don’t ever want to feel like I’ve had to feel.”

  She growled at me but dropped the smoke onto the flat stone.

  “Hey,” Charlie piped up, “is the walk made all wavy like this to make old sailors feel more welcome?”

  “Old drunken sailors,” Warren added.

  “Well,” Reverend St. Paul said as he turned the big iron key in the cranky, clanky lock, “I hope so, because old drunken sailors are very much welcome here.”

  It was cold inside, colder than outside, and the only light was coming through the small but numerous windows set up at various odd heights and angles of the main meeting hall. The hall itself was about the size of a primary school classroom, with two blocks of dark wooden benches divided by a middle aisle. There was a strong odor of salted wood mold that I actually found comforting, and that nearly succeeded in defeating all the other odors.

  “I like it,” I found myself saying.

  “I love it,” said the bride, taking my hand.

  “Spooks the shit outta me,” said Charlie Waters Junior. “But yeah. Yeah.”

  We all let it hang there, some silence and scent, as we got used to where we were and what we were there for. In no order, other than me sliding right up next to Pristine, the guys all fitted into
different pews and just sat.

  “So,” Warren said out of the stillness, “you actually try to make it, like, inviting here, to all those cracks-of-society types. Like, ‘Come on, all ye sinners, bring us some game. Show me what you got’?”

  “Exactly,” Reverend St. Paul said. “Goddamn, I’d call it the Holy Tabernacle of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, put it on the roof in neon-tube lighting if it would help bring in the people who need to come in.”

  “Ha,” Charlie said. “Rev used ‘goddamn’ the same way the rest of us do.”

  “Well done,” Warren scolded him. “Think maybe this is why you don’t get a lot of wedding invitations?”

  There was another ebb in the flow among the wedding party until this time Pristine pushed through.

  “It was you, wasn’t it, Reverend? Taking care of me. The Salvation Army time. I do remember you. Don’t I?”

  I almost didn’t care now what the answer was because the question was so warm, so sweet and close and grateful that I felt the fine-gauge wire yank more tightly around my heart than ever.

  “There were a great many dedicated Soldiers who worked here over the years, and certainly you were cared for by a number of them. I may have been one.”

  “Can you even do weddings here?” I asked impatiently. “Is it even a church anymore? Where’s the rest of the Army, then?”

  “They do good work,” Reverend St. Paul said. “But maybe a little too militaristic in their ways. I was given official marching orders to go to a new congregation. I resisted, gave up my Soldiership. Didn’t matter, they were pulling out, anyway. I decided to stay. There was still important work, God’s work, which needed to be done here, regardless of whatever shingle we hung over the door.”