by Jon Keller
I got a girlfriend, he said. His voice was a coarse whisper from a sand-filled throat.
So? She reached up to his belt and unhooked the harpoon buckle. He put his hands on hers to stop her but his hands had no strength. She popped the button on his pants. She stood and gripped his thin hips and pushed him back until he sat on the edge of the bed. His eyes glazed. She lifted one leg and her legs were long. She set a foot on the bed next to his hip and set her hands on his shoulders. I’ll show you some things that will make your girlfriend’s eyes roll into the back of her head.
His chest pinched like a claw crushing a piece of bait. He thought of Charlotte.
Are you scared? She dug her fingertips into his shoulders. He felt the nails bite his skin and the biting shot down his spine and up his neck.
I ain’t scared of nothing.
What makes you such a good lobsterman, Julius? You are good, aren’t you?
I hang down on her is why.
You hang down on her?
Yeah. I hang down and don’t ever slow down.
She backed up and bent over so her mouth was very close to his and her spine was a long flat tabletop. She held his eyes. Would your father like me, Julius?
The words were lost somewhere like a buoy in fog.
What would your father do? Right now, if he was you, what would Chimney Wesley do? Chimney, isn’t that his name? Chimney Wesley? I’ll bet he hangs down on her, doesn’t he, Julius?
Julius didn’t answer her. His father’s name filled his head as if she were saying it over and over. She had no right to say his name but she would not stop.
Lines of adrenaline seared in his head. He couldn’t tell if he was hearing her voice or some voice inside his own head but either way he needed for the voice to stop.
What would your father do? Wouldn’t he hang down?
Julius’s muscles latched. He blinked. It was a deliberate blink and when his eyes opened Gwen saw an emptiness that made her shudder. She stepped away from him and studied him to be sure that she hadn’t imagined something. She looked for something to cover herself with but found nothing. She told herself to relax. She went to the table and drank hard from the wine bottle and looked out the window at the city lights. She held the bottle like a club at her hip.
Her hands shook. She felt him step behind her. She drank more. His hands slipped around her rib cage and gripped her breasts. She shivered. She pulled one of his hands free and put the wine bottle in it. She heard his swallows close to her ear and glimpsed the roll of his throat like a snake feeding. She looked down at his hand on her breast and the fingers gripped so hard she thought the tissue would tear.
She breathed in short blasts. She turned and faced him. The city lay down behind them. Julius looked as if his body were the only part of him in the room and he pushed in close and grabbed her shoulders and spun her around. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and shoved her head down to the picture window. She had to brace herself with her hands on the glass and her neck bent so her cheekbone and jaw and ear smeared against the glass. She caught a quick glimpse of Julius’s reflection breached amid the city lights. Her hair was still wrapped tight and hard in his fist. He shifted behind her. A squeak piled and clogged in her throat. She closed her eyes and every bit of strength she ever had disappeared. She saw an image of her mother lying in bed white and dying and Gwen was a teenager then but before she untangled the squeak that was about to become a scream she felt first his hand then his body go limp.
Then he released her.
She gathered herself for a quick moment against the window. She didn’t want to see him but she forced herself to turn and look. He sat cross-legged on the floor. His back was curved so that his face was buried beside his ankles. She watched and soon he began to pound the sides of his head with the heels of his hands as if trying to free something within.
She dodged around him. She heard him choke. She grabbed her purse from the table then in the bathroom she locked the door and wrapped a robe around herself. She ignored the reflection in the mirror. She splashed her face with cold water. She sat on the tub edge until the shaking stopped.
There was a fresh layer of snow on the ground when Julius stepped out of Osmond’s truck. He crossed the driveway and went inside and took a cola from the refrigerator and went back out the door. He drove down to the harbor and parked and looked out over the water and sipped his cola. The wintertime dragger fleet was in the harbor and his own traps were stacked aboard the Dolly Rhonda and it took him a moment to realize that he hadn’t put them there.
He held the can of cola to his chest and squeezed it with both hands. He thought about Bill and Jonah and Virgil. He stared at the neat pile of traps. Not only had they taken his gear up but they’d stolen his boat. His new boat. He put his truck in gear and slowly backed away as if the sight was more than he could handle.
He drove past his house and into the blueberry barrens until he hit unplowed roads. He turned around. He dropped off the barrens. He didn’t know what to do. The image of Virgil or Bill or Jonah on his boat was painful and once again he slapped the side of his head with the heel of his hand as if to beat something away.
Anything but fuck with his new boat. It couldn’t have been Virgil alone. He was too old and fat to take up that much gear in a day. He would’ve had to be offshore to find the gear. Then he’d have to come back in and steal the Dolly Rhonda. But they could have loaded their boats and offloaded the traps onto his boat. No. They wouldn’t do that. The only question was whether or not Captain Bill had a part in it. He knew damned well Jonah had.
• • •
It was the edge of dark when Julius pulled into Bill’s driveway. He waited in his truck until Bill stepped out of the house and crossed the dooryard. Julius rolled his window down.
Julius, said Bill.
You have anything to do with it? Yes or no.
To do with what?
Don’t.
I ain’t exactly in the mood for your shit, Julius. Bill pushed his glasses up on his nose and lit a cigarette.
Yes or no, Captain. Did you have anything to do with it?
I don’t know what you’re blathering about and like I said, I ain’t in the mood for your shit.
Julius put his truck in gear and backed away. He spun his tires until they smoked and peeled down the road. Bill waited in the dooryard and watched Julius pull into Virgil’s driveway and disappear through the birches.
Julius parked his truck next to Virgil’s and waited and rubbed his cheeks and honked his horn. Virgil’s passenger side window rolled down. Julius saw Virgil sitting in his truck and it startled him.
Julius, Virgil said. What can I do for you?
Julius had a lump in his throat. He felt like he was trying to balance on an edge that some force kept knocking him from.
Nothing, Julius said.
Good. Now get the fuck out of my driveway.
Julius gripped the steering wheel and looked straight ahead. You been messing with my boat?
Messing with your boat? Virgil patted Chowder’s head. How do you mean?
Yes or no.
Oui or non?
You been messing with my boat? Yes or no?
You look good today, Virgil said.
This is it, said Julius and put his truck in reverse and backed out of the driveway.
He sat in his truck at the wharf for an hour. He watched the boats on their moorings and he watched darkness spill over the water. He took the talisman tooth from his pocket and rattled it in his closed hand as if readying to make a wish. He ate several hard candies and would have cried but he swallowed the need like something that didn’t quite fit down his throat.
He ran his forearm across his nose. There were fingernail scratches on the underside of the forearm from Gwen’s grip and he looked at them and smiled to himself and pinched the sudden image of Charlotte from his mind. Who the fuck did either of them think they were?
Someday, he thought. Someday all of them wou
ld understand who he was. He wasn’t his father or his grandfather. He was something different altogether. He was Julius Caesar Wesley and his boat was thunder so fuck the ocean because he’d walk right across it.
Let them see. Just let them see.
He thought of Gwen rearing against his hips with her face smeared against the windowpane. Her hair in his fist. She dreamed of fruit and she had wanted to trade her dreams with him. He felt suddenly nauseous. He wished for a split second that he could hold his grandfather by the hair and slam that face into something more solid than a window.
The hell with running the pound. Spend his life on the wharf and sell crates of lobsters and talk with bait sellers and truck drivers and run around on a forklift and stack lobsters in big swimming pools. Goddamned Jason Jackson with his white coat and big talk and Jap girl. Quality was good and Jason knew some stuff but he wasn’t a fisherman. He didn’t understand that it wasn’t about marketing or shipping or product. It was about something bigger. It was about leaving the world behind.
Julius slammed his hand against the steering wheel. He looked out across the harbor. The sky was choked in cloud and a few flakes of snow began to fall and they stuck to his windshield like dead moths. He could make out the ghostlike draggers on their moorings and for a quick second he wished he was in jail with his father so they could run the show there together.
But he didn’t need his father.
He got out of his truck. The wharf was lit by a single overhead light and the light shone down on dirty snow banks and empty beer cans and gas station food wrappers. He climbed into the truck bed and opened his toolbox. He sorted through the tools and came out with a rusty fish knife and a flashlight. He shut the box and walked down the asphalt shingle ramp and untied his skiff. He turned the gas on and pulled the choke and started the small outboard.
He rounded the dark head of Burnt Island and cut between the ledges. Small waves opened like incisions in the sea. Ram’s Head and Two Penny were both black pits. The Drown Boy light circled like a watchtower.
Once through the rocks he twisted the throttle and sped east and before him surfaced the moon’s pale face. Snowflakes melted against his chin and cheeks. Thoughts of Charlotte welled up from somewhere and they were fringed with guilt but he had no time for guilt. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He wasn’t married to Charlotte and Gwen had got what she’d come for. He tensed his back muscles and stretched the skin and he grinned. Charlotte. Just a little girl is what she was. Maybe he’d show her. Teach her something Jonah never could. Make her eyes roll into the back of her head.
In fifteen minutes he shut the engine down and lifted the prop from the water and locked it in place. He took out his oars and turned up the oarlocks and they knocked and splashed in the silent night. Cloud cover cloaked the moon and the sea turned black and Julius rowed across the black sea.
He made his way into the cove and nearly ran into Jonah’s boat before he saw its shadowed hull shape. Two radio antennas rose fifteen feet from the wheelhouse. He tied his skiff off and climbed aboard. He opened the hatch and shined the light down forward. He had to bend over to stand. The engine filled most of the bow space and the rest of the space was old junk and Julius said out loud, What a fucking slob, and as he said it he thought of Charlotte with Jonah.
Let them see.
He shined the light around the bottom and found the through-hull where the seawater was pumped into the coolant system. He wedged himself between the engine block and the pipe and reached out with the knife and worked its serrated edge against the thick rubber hose. He cut the hose clean off and water gushed in. He stood and watched the flooding bilge and only then did he wonder about a high water alarm. He looked around and found an old fish hatchet and swung it against the battery cable. The blade sliced through the cable and into the battery revealing the acid ventricles.
He dropped the hatchet and climbed above and shut the hatch and swung into his skiff and pushed off. He rowed until he was almost out of sight of the boat then paused to watch. His skiff bobbed in the cove. Everything was black and the ocean beyond the cove had a hollow echo like a moan. It was twenty minutes before the bow dove and half that before the stern rose and the boat dropped into the sea.
Jonah heard the far-off running of the outboard as he read a book in bed. He wondered why a skiff would be running at night but the noise stopped. He tried to concentrate on his book but his mind was scattered. He turned the lantern off and rolled over and folded his pillow in half and opened the window. He tasted saltwater. He slept and awoke in the middle of the night and stepped outside to piss. Several inches of new snow had fallen and more was falling so hard and thick that he couldn’t see his wharf or the water below. He shivered and went back to bed and lay with his eyes open to the heavy darkness. His future was out there and he felt as though a tunnel extended from his chest to the long ocean chasm and some unseen force at the end of the tunnel was drawing him in limb by limb.
He fell asleep then woke to a hard blue sky. It was ten degrees and a cloudbank lay piled at the end of the ocean as if swept offshore by the coming dawn. He stood in the window and looked over the sea. Deepwater swells broke white against the ledges and flags of water vapor rose like smoke. Everything was clear and everything was quiet but the Jennifer was nowhere in sight. His heart clanked as his eyes searched and he wondered if he’d left her in the harbor but knew he had not.
The nighttime ringing of the outboard came back to him like a jarring of the head. He pulled his clothes and jacket on and stuffed his feet into his boots and jogged through the snow-covered woods. The spruce branches hung low and looked like white wings that showered him with snow as he passed. He stepped onto the wharf and looked again for his boat but it was gone. He flipped his skiff over and slid it into the water.
The wind gusted and the rising sun slid across the sky and burned white atop the sea smoke. A loon surfaced beside him then shat and dove again. Jonah leaned his head over and scanned the bottom as he rowed. He saw the loon dart by like a torpedo. He made three passes before he saw the white shape of the hull ten feet down. He wondered how he’d missed it. He could see the boat perfectly and everything was intact in what looked like a silent and still world. A shudder wrapped his spine.
Sonofabitch, he said out loud.
The boat lay careened over on its washrail and the mooring ball floated like a drowned seagull just below the water’s surface. He rowed against the tide and drifted back and peered through the green water and he slapped the water with an oar then did so again and again. He dropped the oars and let himself drift with the tide toward the mouth of the cove. He saw blue gloves and orange oil pants and orange mesh bait bags and buckets washed ashore and he left them there. He took up the oars again and rowed as hard as he could out into the gulf and the small skiff rose and fell in the sea-swell.
A flock of pintails beat against the water then launched. Eiders honked in the distance. The shoreline was white with snow and blasts of wind lifted the snow from the spruce tops and flung it into the air as if the trees themselves were afire. He gripped the oars tight in his hands. He gazed out to sea to where the cloudbank rested on the horizon. The ocean was blue. He rubbed his face with one hand. It wasn’t Julius’s fault and it was too bad he couldn’t forget this. He remembered the feeling of cutting off Osmond’s traps and he felt that returning. He felt suddenly calm.
He released the oars and they hung in their locks. He looked around. Scarves of sea smoke like ghosts surrounded him and he felt the icy vapor on his skin and in his lungs. The skiff rose and fell with the rolling waves. The temperature had continued to drop and his hands and feet were numb. A fine slick of ice coated the gunwales and oars and floor. Beyond the sea smoke he could see no land. The only thing between him and the late December water was the small and fragile wooden skiff. Only boat and ocean remained. Wood and water and rock and he bowed his head with the cold and pranced his numb fingers on the oars and he rowed on.
The mo
uth of the harbor finally appeared. The water was deep green and he glimpsed a group of sandpipers feeding atop a ledge. Wood smoke rose from a few farmhouse chimneys. Jonah rowed hard against the ebb tide and fixed his eyes fast on the horizon. As he neared the boats he swung the skiff about and rowed stern-first toward the rundown wharf and the beat-up dragger fleet and he breathed the sharp stink of wintertime diesel and this all was his home.
Virgil’s right, Jonah whispered. He’s goddamned right.
He pulled his skiff onto the iced float and flipped it over and tied the painter off to a ringbolt. He climbed the ladder and crossed the snow-covered wharf. He saw a gull’s tracks and the impression of its wingtips where the bird had left the ground. He stopped and stared at the strange snow striations. He took long breaths that he felt ripple through his entire body like fresh blood. He stared for so long at the marks and felt so newly curious at his world that when he looked up the light had shifted and the harbor looked just a little bit different.
Ibeen thinking about you, Virgil said when Bill and Jonah stepped into the kitchen. He was drinking a cup of coffee and picking at a bowl of oatmeal. Celeste sat next to him with an orange on her plate and a knife in her hand. The Captain and the Downcoast Highliner, Virgil muttered.
My boat’s on bottom, Jonah said. That sonofawhore sunk her on her mooring.
Virgil took a bite of the oatmeal and swallowed it. He sipped his coffee. Celeste says I’ve got to shape up, he said. She seems to be of the mind that a man can’t live off brandy and milk. I told her I get a hotdog fixed with chopped onion each time I’m up to the Irving. Onion’s good for the prostate.
