THUGLIT Issue Eleven

by Matthew McBride

  For at least a year before we left Oakland, it seemed like sailing was all Tim could talk about.

  Tim had started spending all his time looking at boats for sale on the internet. I'd gone with him to see a half-sunk wooden boat over in Sausalito and a steel ketch with thick rust streaks running down the sides of the hull at a weird marina all the way back in the delta somewhere.

  I was 39. It felt like too late for a do-over. I guess I'd had the idea that if I did something he wanted, he'd give me something I wanted. Compromise. Looking back, I could see it was completely wrong. With this kind of thing, you were either all in or all out. Kids—what, it was going to be "my" kid? And the boat—our life on this stupid vessel would be "his" life?

  We were both counting the days till we could get to Papeete. I'd take a plane from there. He'd always wanted to see New Zealand. He'd find crew. There was always somebody hanging around the marina, hoping to catch a ride.

  The animal-fodder smell of the cooked mung beans wafted under the door.

  In the end, we'd bought a wooden boat—the kind of thing that was for purists, traditionalists. Most people thought owning a wooden boat was crazy. Beautiful, sure, but completely impractical. Tim was drawn to that kind of thing. He was never much of a follower. I used to like that about him, how he'd buck any trend. Go his own way. And he was a good sailor, a natural. With the result that we were now starving halfway around the world.

  "You want some?" he called through the door. The offer sounded grudging.

  "No thanks."

  "I could make some rice."

  He was trying to be nice now.

  "Don't worry about it."

  It was like whatever had brought us together, made us want to get married, had happened to other people.

  Later I went to shore, rowing our rubber inflatable dinghy so I wouldn't have to turn on the engine. Tim was right. I should get comfortable with the fucking outboard. But I'd be out of here soon, back to…I'd probably end up back at my mom's place. Where I could live for free. Sort of.

  I trailed a line in the water with the rotting body of a hermit crab stuck on the hook. Soon something tugged at it and I threw myself to the side of the dinghy to pull it in. But whatever had been there had taken the bait and gone.

  The little waves hitting the coral at the edge of the water sounded like tinkling bells. Tiny coral bones knocking together. Just under the surface there were clusters of clams, their wavy mouths lined with neon green and pink, like decorations at a tiki bar. The shark passed again, the black tip of its dorsal fin breaking the water.

  Between the inside and the outside of the atoll was a long stretch of rock the birds used for breaking shells. Some of the shells didn't break and there were huge cowries wedged in among the rock. I could see the ocean waves crashing, white spray rising in slow motion. The clouds at the horizon were a deep gray, almost lavender.

  I walked for hours out there. I hardly tripped over the jagged rocks anymore.

  We heard the sound of a motor early the next morning.

  There was a banging on the hull. I could hear Tim get up. He still slept naked and I could imagine him standing in the companionway, having been woken from a dream, smothering his hard-on. Or not bothering—if some asshole wanted to come by this early…

  "What do you want?"

  I was wide awake. I hung over the edge of the bunk and grabbed some clothes off the floor.

  In fact, Tim had put on a pair of shorts. I edged up the steps next to him and looked out.

  The boat was a fiberglass fishing dinghy. It had a powerful outboard that looked almost new, with a bright yellow sticker on it from a store that sold fishing gear in Santa Barbara.

  The man was holding a shoulder bag, the strap bunched in one hand. He had a canvas sack in the other, tied with a drawstring at the top. He said something that was half in French and half in a kind of broken English.

  Tim turned to me. "What's he saying?"

  "He has pearls. He wants to sell us some."

  "Fuck. Why the fuck is he here so early?"

  "I don't know. I'll tell him to go away."

  Tim rubbed his eyes and for the first time I noticed that he looked…defeated. He said, "You've been going on and on about pearls."

  "I don't care anymore. We don't have any extra money."

  "Oh, come on. You know I'll never hear the end of it. They're probably not that expensive. Now that we've made it all the way here."

  The man was watching us talk. It seemed like he probably didn't understand much English, but I'd learned it was a mistake to make assumptions like that. His light green eyes traveled between us like he knew what kind of discussion we were having, even if he wasn't catching most of the words.

  "OK. I guess."

  I told the man in my rusty collegiate French to come aboard. It came out sounding kind of jokey and at the same time overly formal.

  He slung his shoulder bag over the gunwale and climbed up as nimbly as if he did this kind of thing every day. That made me feel a little better. Maybe he was always going out to boats to sell pearls to the cruisers.

  The man came down the stairs and sat next to the table in the salon, which Tim had made out of some kind of special tropical hardwood and varnished to a visceral gloss.

  He pulled a bottle of Ricard out of the shoulder bag.

  "You have a glass?" He'd said it politely but it wasn't really a question. At this point most of the things we'd brought had broken. He looked at the old mayonnaise jar I handed him for a couple of seconds before uncapping the bottle and pouring. The stuff was thick and yellowish, climbing up the edges. He drank some and spread out a cloth. It looked dull and almost dirty against the wood. The pearls rolled to the edges and lay there shimmering. Eggplant purple, dove gray, a deep gray that was almost black.

  "Coffee?"

  The man shook his head. Tim rubbed his face tiredly. He hadn't shaved in at least a week. I crammed coffee grounds into the stovetop espresso maker, flicked on the propane and sat down again.

  "What do we do?"

  "Choose which you want. We talk about price after."

  "Which ones are the best?"

  He shrugged.

  "But how do we know which ones we should pick?"

  "Pick the ones you like."

  I reached into the mass of pearls. At first they all looked almost exactly alike. Shiny and round. I picked one up and studied it. It was bulbous, slightly misshapen, a tumor starting to form on one end.

  I put it down and picked up another. A big silver one. I rolled it around on my palm. They were heavy. Mesmerizing. Each one reflected everything around it in beautiful miniature.

  "This one."

  The man shrugged again.

  I looked at Tim. "You pick, too. Help me." He poked at them with his finger and they all moved, as if it were one organism.

  The pile of pearls we'd chosen lay off to one side. They all looked the same again. Different, but the same. It was true that I'd been saying I wanted pearls. It was something I'd gotten into my head. Some incentive to come this far. It seemed pointless now, but it was too late to take it all back.

  The man had finished the bottle of Ricard. He looked significantly at his empty glass.

  Tim said, "I think we have some tequila."

  He got up and went over to the place where we kept the liquor packed away so it wouldn't roll around.

  The man was picking up each pearl in our little pile, squinting expertly at them, tossing a few down disdainfully.

  The man had moved outside to the cockpit and was reclining there, his arm spread proprietarily along the edge. The bottle of tequila was next to him, maybe half an inch left in the bottom.

  He looked at Tim and said, "Do you have a gun?"

  His English had improved markedly. He still had a slight accent but that was all.

  We did have a gun. It was one of the things we'd argued about before leaving. Tim had said we needed some self-defense. He'd talked to someone who'd
heard about a couple on an island near Panama who'd been killed by pirates.

  The next day he'd gone out and bought one at Wal-Mart.

  "No," Tim said.

  We'd gone to the range once. I hated shooting. It felt ugly and shocking to shoot a gun. It felt like you could punch holes in the universe. When I'd touched the trigger there was something about the feeling of it, about the power it had. A power you shouldn't start thinking was normal and ordinary. We'd bought lots of bullets, too. We'd heard you were supposed to bring bullets to trade with the locals. That they used them to shoot goats.

  There was nothing out here, nothing but water and waves and coral and palm trees whose dead branches, brushing against each other, made a musical whisper.

  Why did the man want to know if we had a gun? Would it have been better to say yes? Tim's eyes flashed to me, like he was trying to send me a message. I tried to get to that place they talk about where people can read each other's minds.

  It was too late for us. We were out of practice. We hadn't communicated for months, maybe years.

  I went down below. Tim followed me, leaving the man there. Maybe he would just go away. Tim's face had a hollow look. Hunger, listlessness. He'd emptied out all of the sudden. Or maybe I'd just noticed it.

  The sound of the man's feet came through the deck above. His footsteps passed over our heads. Then silence, for awhile. An enormous splash.

  He was gone.

  Then we heard him again, hauling himself back up onto the deck. Dripping onto the teak. A brief slosh, like he'd taken his clothes off.

  "I'm sorry," Tim said.

  "It's okay." I tried to laugh. Why was he saying this now? After all these months? Now that we had gone too far and there was no way back?

  "I'm sorry about everything," he said. "I don't know what happened. With us."

  "Me neither. I guess I didn't know how to do this. This whole thing. Marriage."

  Maybe inside everybody their real self is cornered, confined. And when it tries to get out everything around it warps and twists it. That real, pure self can never express itself. Maybe that was just how life is. You can never really be yourself.

  Tim started up the companionway to see what the guy was doing, what he wanted. If he was ever going to leave.

  I heard Tim start to say something. He said, "What are—"

  I could almost feel the thud of something heavy on something soft. From halfway up the steps I saw the swinging winch handle at the end of its arc, and the shockingly fragile human body that was Tim, falling, draping with a sort of grotesque elegance across the blond wood of the tiller.

  The gun was somewhere, was somewhere, somewhere. Was here—behind the charts and books with swollen pages and chargers for Mexican cellphones and the single sideband radio that had never worked and the bullets. Bullets all over the floor, like roaches. If Tim was dead, then what? What?

  The man appeared naked in the rectangle of light, a length of neatly coiled extra line in his hand. I had coiled that. He was uncoiling it. It felt as if everything on the boat belonged to him. Coming down the steps, dripping. His eyes blurred and bloodshot with liquor and too much sun and whatever thoughts were inside him. Bullets slipped improbably into chambers.

  If a bullet went through the hull the boat would sink. We would be here forever—castaways living on coconuts—cannibals.

  I lifted the gun with both hands the way cops do in pictures and pulled the trigger. It only clicked. It clicked. Then it made a sound like the end of the world.

  I'd closed my eyes at the last second like I used to when playing tennis. Keep your eyes on the ball, someone always said. I opened them again and I saw that I had missed the guy. But Tim was at the top of the stairs. He had fallen onto his side, his face only surprised.

  The man was looking at me with a sort of pity in his eyes, that Gallic pity that was mostly condescension. I fired again. Opening another hole in the world. A new river burst forth, its banks already strewn with garbage.

  The windlass was broken. I started hauling up the anchor chain by hand. Finally I could see the shape of it, wavering under the water.

  The water was perfectly clear. The sharks moved so fast and the man's body jerking, vanishing amid the feathery plumes. Being erased.

  It had taken forever to haul him up through the companionway and to the rail, my teeth chattering. Like lugging a mattress.

  It occurred to me that we had all the pearls. The big, pulsating bag of pearls which were actually nothing but grains of sand. Something the oysters had been trying desperately to get rid of.

  The engine caught. Everything was on the other side of the water. Real life was on the other side of the water.

  I steered toward the narrow channel in the reef. The tide was going out, sucking the boat toward the ocean.

  Which way was Papeete? The water was gray now, knocking the boat from side to side. Tim rolled back and forth a little between the bulkheads, with the waves. The pool of blood under him swayed back and forth. I wondered how much diesel was left. Probably not enough to drive all the way. I punched the rubbery buttons on the GPS, looking for coordinates.

  I should have figured out how to use this thing better. I needed Tim. I'd known I needed him and maybe that was one of the things that made me hate him.

  I didn't hate him anymore. I wanted to catch a flutter of the life that was pulling free of him and press it back securely. We would love each other again. We would find those pure trapped selves inside us and start over.

  The clouds on the horizon piled up in soft gray masses. A vein of lighting lit a vaporous mountain, a mountain made of nothing more than water.

  The sail jibed and caught the wind with a heave. The wind, which was inhuman, wordless, unreasoning. The boat heeled over, picking up speed, water passing the hull in a smooth rush. We were moving fast, me and it.

  There was no way to tell what was real and what was just an idea. There was no way to tell if I was really awake. Tim's body must be just a picture in my mind. I hung over the rail, vomiting as the boat accelerated recklessly downwind. I would wake up with the gray film of a terrible dream across another bright tropical morning.

  In this dream, we were going fast toward nowhere—jumping out into space, like the people leaping from the burning towers of the World Trade Center, taking ages to plummet all that distance, tumbling like acrobats. From the wheel I was sure I could see Tim glance up at me. I asked him to forgive me. I dreamed that this would be the last thing we would ever do together—fly.

  Dinner Rush

  by Angel Luis Colón

  "Hector, for fuck's sake, can you move a little faster?" Jerry wiped the sweat from his forehead for the sixth time in under a minute. "We got three chicken parms, two orders of the veggie ziti—and for some goddamn reason, someone finally decided to have the mussels."

  "Okay, boss." Hector kept his back to Jerry, juggling pots, pans, spoons and knives like a machine. Even his speaking was monotone and lifeless. "Mussels are done." He turned for a split-second and left a plate of steaming mussels in a light, garlic broth.

  Jerry grabbed the plate, dressed it up. "Get a move on with the side dishes too. Still waiting on some fusilli and marinara, how long is that supposed to fucking take?" He wiped his brow again.

  The rest of kitchen staff remained silent. It wouldn't matter if they said a word—the only answers he'd accept were plated.

  Jerry reviewed the remaining order slips: an eggplant parm, salmon and rice, and yet another order of mussels. He slipped a pencil from behind his ear and wrote on a notepad he kept at the edge of his counter. Order more mussels? More plates appeared in front of him and he sorted them by muscle memory, a member of their three-man wait staff appearing to snatch each one away every few seconds.

  "Anything else, boss?" Hector busied himself with the final preparations for veggie ziti.

  "Just what we got posted. It looks like it's petering down, so start cleaning up a little. Your stations look like shit."<
br />
  "Mister Eric, how are you?" Jerry heard Ernie, their dishwasher, say. His jaw clamped when he heard the name.

  "Hey, folks." Eric walked into the kitchen wearing both a shit-eating grin and what looked like a brand new suit. He gave the area a cursory glance. "Looking good, fellas. Kicking some ass, huh?"

  Hector nodded from his station without looking up. The rest of the crew continued their work.

  Jerry smiled to himself. Loyalties were exactly where they should be—except for the idiot dishwasher. "Hector? Can you man the fort?" He slipped his hairnet and apron off. "You…" he pointed to Eric, "…office." Jerry didn't bother to say hi or shake Eric's hand. He just wanted to get this over with as soon as he could.

  Eric put on a bigger smile and followed, giving whatever kitchen staff he passed a light tap on the shoulder or back. "Good to see everyone," he said before walking into the office.

  "Close the door behind you," Jerry said.

  Eric listened.

  Jerry narrowed his eyes. "You've been gone three and a half weeks, Eric," he said.

  "Well…" Eric, clearly uncomfortable, fidgeted in his chair. "Yeah, I had a few loose ends to handle."

  "That don't involve this place?"

  "The office?"

  "No, asshole, the restaurant you half own. You know, the place I spend eighteen hours a goddamned day cooking and screaming and bleeding in. The place you treat like an afterthought?"

  "I thought I was the numbers guy and you were the…"

  Jerry interrupted with his fist against the desk. "But there ain't any number crunching that gets done on your end."

  "I get it."

  "No you don't. We're two years deep in this mess and there's no sign of getting out of it without scars."

  "I understand, but I've been—"

  "Blowing your way through your dad's cash and fucking me over the stove?"