by Morris, Ian;
He paced back to the window. “Forget it. No way.”
I dug around for a second bill. “Forty, then.”
“What is that? Drug money?”
“Actually, it’s meat money.”
Not even knowing what I meant, he laughed, in spite of himself, and that was the end of the discussion. “Just for tonight. Give it over,” he said.
“You mean you’re actually going to take it?”
“You said.”
“All right.” I handed him a bill.
“You said forty.”
“Jeez, Ship.”
“Okay, twenty,” he said. “But you got to put your clothes on.”
I did and was asleep again before Ship put out the lights. In the morning, I woke to the sound of him pacing the floor. I waited for him to go and jumped out of bed as soon as he was gone. I headed straight for the factory.
The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and heard the steel catwalk ringing with the sound of footsteps. Dru was standing at the top of the stairs, leaning, arms folded, against the rail in black tights and an oversized green sweatshirt that said NIAGRA FALLS. Her hair was wet from the shower and mussed from a towel and she stood there for a good half-minute, letting me take in the sight, her eyes, from a distance, black as pinpoints. Then she ran down the stairs at a pace that would have tripped anybody lacking an athlete’s balance, and with her hands balled into fists launched at me and caught my neck in an elbow lock.
“You can’t see the dress until tomorrow,” she said. “It’s bad luck, but this is it in the wrapper. You’re going to die.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Bea found it. She and Mike have been running all over the place. He found a costume for you. Harold wants you to be James E. Buckingham, the boy who asks Booth for a ticket when he’s on his way up to commit the dastardly act. Do you want to?”
“How am I going to know what to do?”
Dru laughed, “You don’t have any lines. Harold walks in. You reach out your hand. He says, ‘You don’t need a ticket from me, Buck.’ And bounds up the stairs whistling a tune.”
“Then what happens?”
“We do everything according to history. We’re going to show up forty-five minutes after the meeting starts. I’m playing Clara Harris, Mike’s Major Rathbone, Harriette’s Mary Todd—dressed as herself, Bea couldn’t get her to wear anything else, but it’s kind of appropriate when you think about it—Harold and Roy, you know. The regents meet in the Union Theater. There’s a box. Harold knows a guy who can get us in. When our grant comes up on the agenda, Harold’s going to burst in and bang. Then Mike pretends to try and stop him, then Harold pretends to stab him, and then leaps on to the stage and yells, ‘The Stovepipe Foundation grant application procedure is arcane and unfair!’ and dashes out the door to the waiting Volvo.”
“Kind of a mouthful, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, well, the real line is sic semper tyrannus but since, as a company, we haven’t established a position on tyranny, we thought it would be preachy. Then Bea—who’s planted in the front row—gets up and screams, ‘Heaven help the republic!’”
“And then what?”
Dru shrugged. “I guess we run. It’s against the law to yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. This has got to be worse.”
“Some prank,” I said.
Dru smiled and shrugged. “We’re deploying the term event.”
“When would I have to decide?”
“Before tomorrow afternoon. Nobody knows you’re back. They’re not expecting you. They’ll be so thrilled. Harold’s been wearing his Booth outfit ever since you left. When he sees us on campus he pretends not to know us and will only communicate through coded notes that he slips into our hands. Very sinister. He’s got all these girls following him around, which is a first for Harold and a waste of time for them. And he’s making Roy wear his Lincoln suit, but Roy says he got the short end because everybody thinks he’s some minimum wage guy passing out flyers for a new bank.”
She smiled. It was a grin I’d never seen before from her.
“Okay.”
“Oh great. God, I’m happy. I’ll call Bea and have her bring over your clothes. And I should get word to Harold—but how?” The melodrama of the phrase struck and she laughed. “If only there was a way.”
“I’ll look for him,” I said, “I’ve got to go get my stuff.”
The door was unlocked. I pushed it open far enough to see a girl’s feet, brown and scuffed with dirt. There was the smell of cigarettes, and then someone slammed the door shut pinning my shoulder against the jamb. “Ow,” I yelled, “what the fuck, Ship?” and then a voice I knew said, “Tom?” The door swung open and there was Callie lying on my bed.
“Hey, Tom,” she said and then Grey caught me in a bear hug before I saw him coming at me from behind the door. “Brother,” he said, “Man, we’re glad it’s you.”
“Bottom line is we’re on the run,” Grey told me, once we were all sitting on my bunk.
“We’re not on the run,” Callie said. Her belly strained at the bib of her overalls. Her arms were as thin as handlebars. There were circles under her eyes and her nose was running. She seemed to have forgotten the carton of orange juice in her hand. “The deal was we’d come here and talk to you, and we’d all figure what to do next.”
“What’d you do?” I asked Grey.
“I sank the boat,” he said, which explained why his hair, which had mostly grown back, was matted and his coveralls smelled.
“Which boat?”
“The ketch. The one the guy wanted me to sail over from Canada.”
“How’d it sink?”
“A fire,” he said.
“Did you start it?”
“I might have—when I poured gas in the cabin and shot it with the flare gun.”
“What you do that for?”
“Long story.”
There was the sound of a key in the lock and, before Grey could get up and hold it shut, the door swung open. It was Ship. “Aw, no way,” he said the second he saw us. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m going to go tell Howie.”
“Can’t let you do that, Shipper,” Grey said, getting between him and the door.
“You said one night,” Dennis said to me forlornly. “And you didn’t say anything about him. Oh hi,” he said to Callie, seeing her and her condition for the first time.
“Hi,” Callie replied.
“Like you can see, this is an unusual situation, Dennis,” I said. “You’re going to have to be a little flexible.”
“What’s going on?”
“Callie’s having a baby.”
“Now?”
“Yes,” Grey said.
“No, not now,” Callie said.
“But soon,” I said.
Ship inched toward the door. “I have to pee,” he said.
“I told you you got to stay here,” Grey said.
“But I really got to go.”
Grey looked at me. “Let him go,” I said.
“All right,” Grey said. “I’ll go with you.”
“You’re going to go to the bathroom with me?”
“Sure,” Grey said. “Pretend we’re girls.”
The second they were out of the room Callie started to cry. “Tom, you’ve got to get him to stop.”
“How much trouble is he in?”
“I don’t know. He won’t tell me.”
I got up and stood by the door to hear when Grey and Ship came back. “We’ll go back tomorrow night,” I said. “I got a thing I have to do and then we can go.”
“But what if Grey won’t?”
“Don’t worry,” I said.
“I feel like throwing up,” she said.
“Is that what they call morning sickness?”
She laughed over the tears. “I was over that a long time ago. I just feel like throwing up.”
Grey pushed Dennis back into the room with a grip on his shoulder.
“That
wasn’t so bad,” Grey said.
Dennis said, “I’ve got glee club in an hour.”
“You got to miss that one,” I told him.
“They’ll come looking for me.”
“It’s just till tomorrow, Ship,” I said. “Callie and me talked it over. We’re leaving tomorrow. Till then you have to stick this out with us. It’ll mean a lot.”
Ship looked at Callie, who was blowing her nose for the fiftieth time. He was in love, no question about it. As long as he believed he was helping her, we had a chance. “We get no unexcused absences. Someone’s going to have to write me a note.”
At dinnertime, I went down to the cafeteria and got sandwiches packed in plastic triangles and Cokes and milk for Callie. Twice I called the factory to tell Dru that I wouldn’t be over until the next day, but no one answered. Callie fell asleep before eleven, curled on my old bed and Dennis said we should turn out the lights.
Grey and I slept on the floor using our coats for pillows. Before long we heard Ship’s whistling adenoids and figuring he was sleeping, lying on our backs in the dark, Grey told me the story of his sail across Superior.
“I got to the docks at dawn. There were two guys there, fisher types. One stays in the pickup, the other meets me at the boat. I give him the cash, he gives me the key and a sail bag with the jib in it, tells me the rest of the suit of sails is on board. He says, ‘You know what you’re doing?’ I say, ‘Yeah,’ even though I’m thinking I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. My only rule was I wasn’t going to run the motor unless I absolutely had to.
“The first day out was fantastic. Wind out of the northwest, maybe ten knots. The boat handled like a skateboard, quick and easy on the changes of course. It was like God was looking out for me personally.”
“Did you think that was likely?”
“Why not? What beef’s he got with me? I ran a beam reach, all three sails, straight for my mark, which was the Keweenaw Peninsula. From the charts, I made the distance to be 180 nautical miles, maybe twenty-two hours, less if I stayed that lucky. The sun was out, which was good because I found out before long that it got very cold when it wasn’t. Chunks of ice were smacking against the hull.
“At night, the winds slacked, the sails luffed, and I couldn’t work the winches and steer at the same time. The jib fouled when I tried to lower it, and I had to cut it down. Then I find out the global positioning gear is out and I’m up all night, trying to stay on course and freezing my ass off, even in long johns and my parka. In the morning, the winds pick up again only now it’s cloudy and winds are maybe twenty knots this time out of the southeast—which is okay because I can keep my heading—but then I find out that she didn’t handle worth a shit without the jib. It was like trying to keep a spinning top on course. By then I’d been out twenty-four hours and I haven’t touched any of the peanut butter sandwiches, which was all I brought to eat, but the gallon jug of water I brought was almost gone. The only other thing I got to drink is some whiskey I found in the cabin, and I don’t want to drink that ’cause I got to stay awake but I don’t know how long till I reach land and I can’t spare the water, so there I am eating peanut butter sandwiches and washing them down with liquor at seven in the morning.
“I thought I’d be on the water a day and a half. But by dark on the second day, I saw no sign of land and a lot of freighter traffic and so I said, Fuck it, I’m not going to get rammed by twenty thousand tons of iron ore in the middle of the night. So I take down the sails and crank up the motor, which works great for an hour before it runs out of gas. But I don’t panic ’cause I see two other cans below. So I grab the handle of the first of the spare cans and pull as hard as I can to lift it and end up almost throwing it over my shoulder because it’s empty. I go to the second one, and it’s not totally empty. I can hear the gas sloshing around in the bottom. So I hook that one up to the fuel line but there’s not enough left to get the thing primed, and so there I am adrift in a shipping lane at night. At which point there’s nothing much to do outside of jumping overboard, so I went to sleep and prayed to Jesus I wake up in the morning.”
“Which you did.”
“Obviously. And when I did I saw land. Man, Tom, you’ll never have that feeling. I felt like Commodore fucking Perry. I got the mainsail rigged about halfway and figured I’d follow the shoreline the rest of the way.”
“So what happened”
“The Coast Guard.”
“You must’ve been glad to see them.”
He laughed. “So glad I scuttled the boat.”
“Christ. What’d you do that for?”
“That would be largely due to the fifty kilograms of powder taped in the hull.”
“You’re kidding?”
“I’m not.”
For a minute I lay in the dark listening to Callie and Dennis breathing, hoping they hadn’t heard any of this.
“You knew about it?”
“Hell yeah, I knew about it. I knew about it when I came down here. I just might’ve forgot to mention it.”
“Man,” I said, “Who were you getting it for?”
“People,” he said, “Even some people you know.” I heard him roll over and then he was breathing on my cheek. “Remember Natch?” he whispered. “This was his gig. I met him last year at a cookout at Rossmeier’s and he got to talking about what he called these designer drugs. He said that the drugs people are doing now are all obsolete. And that these new drugs that are custom made were what everyone was going to be doing, at least the people who had the money to pay. The problem was procuring the necessary materials. That’s where we came in.”
“But it sank, right? They can’t bust you because your boat sank.”
“I don’t think you’re hearing me. The Coast Guard isn’t exactly my problem right now, or at least they weren’t until I took off on them. I think they wondered why all of a sudden when they show up the boat goes up in flames. When they hauled me out of the water, the officer said, ‘Son, how come your clothes smell like fuel?’ He was from the south. You wouldn’t have thought they’d have southerners in the Coast Guard.”
“Why not? They’ve got coasts. What’d you tell him?”
“I had a fuel leak. That’s what started it. Just a good thing they happened along. Believe me, I played that up big. I said, ‘Man. If it wasn’t for you guys I’d be dead.’ They took me to the station in Black River, and said, ‘Don’t go nowhere.’ I said, ‘Where am I gonna go?’ and first chance I got I went. Walked home forty miles because I didn’t want to hitch and run the risk of getting picked up, got home, got Callie, got Jack’s truck, and here we are.”
“Kind of a mess,” I said.
“Yeah but for a while there it was something. I was master of my ship and the sea. You think anyone around here will ever know that feeling?”
“No, they won’t,” I said. I said it without thinking. But he was right.
“Then that’s something I have on them. Remember when we swam the channel?”
“It’s funny you ask.”
“I saved your life.”
“Yeah, but I think the time you knocked me out of the tree in the Talbotts’ yard with a football kind of evened us out.”
“That was before.”
“It was?”
“Had to be.”
“Then I guess you’re right. I do owe you.”
PART III
LAST SEEN WANDERING VAGUELY
25
USELESS, USELESS
When the phone rang the next morning, Ship made a dive for it, but Grey got there first. It was Dru.
“Look,” she said, “Can you come over? Roy was just here and told me something, and I think he might be nuts.”
The phone woke Callie. She sat up, listing to her right, and clutching at her abdomen below her stomach. She walked out the door. I wondered what the girls on the floor below had made of a pregnant girl they don’t know appearing in their bathroom every hour. Probably honored. It was the kind of thing
they talked about but never got to see.
“What happens when the baby comes?” I asked Grey when I hung up the phone. He was lying on his back, placidly blowing smoke rings at the ceiling.
“Got me. Our college fund’s at the bottom of Lake Superior.”
Either Ship was still asleep or he was faking it. I told Grey to come out into the hall with me and he did, keeping a firm grip on the doorknob. I told him, “I’ve got to go somewhere. Let’s let Ship go and you and Callie come with me.”
“We can’t do it. What if he tells someone?”
“Who’s he going to tell?”
“The cops.”
“What’s he going to tell them?”
“Doesn’t matter what he says. Just that he talks.”
“Come on.”
“I’ll end up floating face down on the Mulberry River.”
“Tell Natch what you did. It must’ve been the right thing, under the circumstances. They got to expect something like that’s going to happen.”
“I don’t know,” Grey said. “We didn’t review the guidelines before I left with fifty thousand dollars of his cash.”
Callie came scuffling up the hall and put her head sleepily on Grey’s chest. “Are we going home now?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, “we’re all going home tonight.”
“Okay, okay,” Grey said, “but we’ll do it this way. You go do what you have to do. We’ll stay here and sit on Ship. Then it won’t matter who he tells because we’ll be on our way.”
While Grey was talking I noticed Howie tacking a flyer on the bulletin board down the hall. I turned my head but not before he saw us.
“Zimmermann,” he said. “Thought we’d lost you.”
“Looks like I’m going to be taking a semester off,” I told him.
“Hardship?”
“Hardship in a big way,” I said.
Just then Dennis yelled out from the room. “Howie, help.”
Howie shook his head. “What’s wrong with Shipman?”
“The usual.”
“Tell him to keep it down,” he said and walked off in search of the next bulletin board.
“See what I mean?” Grey said.
