Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  “You don’t have any money.”

  “I used to.”

  “Jerome. Don’t even think about that!”

  “Ain’t you the hypocrite.”

  “I shouldn’t have got stoned, I know that. I’m a mess, okay?” Angrily she gathered her things. Her damp shirt clung to her. “Do what you want, I don’t care.”

  “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “You look all right.”

  Lois kissed him then, leaned forward and kissed the back of his hand like someone paying respect. “Thanks for that.” He gazed at his steering wheel and wished she’d buttoned her shirt higher. “My sister visiting doesn’t help. It’s like having the Virgin Mary look at you and say, ‘Jeez girl, I never had boy trouble.’”

  Jerome nodded, eyes half shut as if to lessen the glare. Lois had been transformed today; shed of old skin, she was vulnerable now and dangerous. Always before she’d been an obvious hazard on which lesser men foundered, her marriage to Robby a permanent warning like a marker over a reef. Now the marriage was going, the marker was gone, and Jerome had no course to guide him. Wanting Lois but not having her; fretting like a nanny over his son Brendan; liking Matthew — these contradictions to sensible manhood were the crux of his inner life. It was important none of them change.

  From the jail Jerome had driven to the Coast Guard station across town. The streets on the way had sprouted pedestrians who in their shorts and tanktops disavowed the rain and with it summer’s end. Benches on Main Street were occupied by retired fishermen whose oilskins and meerschaums, like warpaint on Indians in Arizona sideshows or leis on waitresses in hotels in Honolulu, translated the local heritage for the cause of livelihood; pleased as geese in the inclement weather, for a dollar they’d pose for a snapshot. Business was slow, however. Most of the tourists were gone — a mixed blessing. In season they choked the roads and treated the locals like servants. On the plus side, they brought their appetites and the money to feed them, arriving flush and ravenous on the Penscot ferry twice a day. From an islander’s perspective the fun looked nonstop. It was amusing watching the locals try to keep up, good family men juggling work and homelife with obligations to party, in the morning-after swearing Never, never again. But there they’d be at happy hour, prowling harborside pubs for the grail of college pussy. The pattern was to leave their mates in June and crawl back to them in September. That their mates might refuse them was a risk apparently worth it.

  Beyond stamina the regimen took money. Many men moonlighted, Jerome included. Lobstering was a sideline to his freelance work as a carpenter and, until last summer, a drug dealer. At his peak he’d moved two ounces of cocaine a week, clearing good money and keeping his own nose packed in the bargain. His wife Eve had permitted the enterprise because most of the profit he’d funneled, after washing it through friendly contractors as wages for fictional labor, first into a small house for themselves, then to their son’s college fund. But Jerome’s balance of payments tipped after Eve died. He did more and more coke himself. To make up the difference he lightened his goods by weight and purity. As his reputation fell he was forced to seek clients where before they’d come to him, increasing his visibility and thus the danger, which in turn increased his coke consumption, his drinking, his paranoia.

  It came to a head last year when on a bad night Jerome beat up Matthew Priam and struck his son Brendan as well, who’d come to Matthew’s aid. They forgave him. He forgave himself — and the third summer after his wife’s drowning Jerome quit his slide cold turkey. No drugs, no drinking, no crazy fun ever again.

  What made sobriety bearable was a latent elitism brought out by Matthew’s devoted ministrations of challenge and praise (himself a terrific snob, Matthew held moral clout even with his detractors, who could call him fem and hack but never hypocrite), elitism most recently evinced in a name change, Jerry to Jerome. And while Jerome still believed himself a bum at heart, by staying straight he felt loftier at least than the bums who didn’t. It was a healthy change, one to be proud of, though nostalgia did persist.

  The Penscot Coast Guard station was located on the harbor’s Bluefin Point. Its lighthouse was the island’s most painted, most photographed site. Matthew had rendered it variously as straight New England kitsch and as a phallic stalk whose glimmering bulb lost seamen couldn’t miss. The Coast Guard had motored Barfly around from the lobster pier and raised her from the water with a sling hoist. Seawater trickled off her skeg. Some uniformed men were examining the hull; one crouched with a Polaroid camera. They showed Jerome a dent in the wood, edged with the canary yellow of a scuba tank.

  Barfly needed work, was what Jerome noticed. The bottom paint was weedy and barnacled, the boot top dark with harbor scum, the zinc on the propeller shaft badly corroded. He crawled under the boat — a rich slime smell, droplets down his neck — and with his knife cut loose a coil of monofilament fouling the propeller shaft. It was expensive hauling a boat at one of the local marinas, so he asked the men to keep Barfly out till he painted her. In the yard an old dory was set on wooden frames for restoration. Beside it was a gas-powered hot water jet used to remove dirt and peeling paint — it would save Jerome hours of scouring. After brief negotiation, a Guardsman agreed to let Jerome use the machine in exchange for Robby’s lobster catch. Making the deal had raised Jerome’s spirits. He’d turned trouble to advantage. He surely deserved a drink.

  At The Cave he ordered coffee. Physically the bar hadn’t changed since he last was here — barnlike, a stage at one end, four pool tables at the other — but in spirit it no longer was the good-time playground of the 1970s nor the revved-up, palpably sinister joint it became in the early eighties. Owner Amos Clearwater had gone respectable since being elected Penscot’s First Selectman. Jerome had gone respectable too — yet fluttering with anticipation of renewed delinquency he beckoned a bartender he knew from the past and declared he was back in the trade. He told the guy to spread the word, to tell his old cronies he was calling The Cave home again, starting tonight.

  The bartender warned him things had changed. Amos was the Sheriff of Nottingham now, and demand, he’d heard, was declining. “I’m off the shit myself,” he apologized.

  Jerome gave a sneer, but inside he was giddy. Reviving the gruff cool of his dealer persona cleansed away dolor like carbon off spark plugs. And he was doing it for Robby, after all. If it amused him, what’s the hurt?

  It was then that he’d gone home to fetch his pistol. He and Eve had restored the old garage together, flooring the roof beams, throwing up dormers, adding a bath. They’d slept on the concrete floor and for heat had burned plywood and strapping. Brendan was a toddler then, too big for the lobster trap that had been his first crib. That same wood trap, sanded, varnished, and topped with glass, was a coffee table now. It had its history.

  When Jerome was just a few days past his army discharge, a few days home on Penscot after twenty months in Vietnam, he’d stood with his wife and watched his baby boy sleep. He’d said to Eve nervously, “That size, make good bait.”

  “I love when you get mushy.”

  He bent for a closer inspection. “I dunno, looks like the mailman.”

  “No more jokes. Say what you feel.”

  What he felt was scared. Last week he’d been humping familiar jungle — no way was he ready for this. Angrily he apologized, “I love you, all right?”

  Jerome’s wife had hugged him then. “It’s okay if you don’t. We got time.”

  Seven

  Built in accordance with local design strictures, Penscot public schools were gray-shingled saltboxes of large proportion. The high school where Brendan Cochran was beginning ninth grade featured a decorative widow’s walk. Little else was unique about the place, though to him the school was a pitiless firmament under which his pathetic life played. He was fourteen, and three times this morning he was struck sick in desperate love.

&nb
sp; He fell first in homeroom for a girl, new in school, of Asian descent. Were it winter he could have skipped introductions and simply dazzled her from afar with his basketball talent. Last year he was the only eighth grader on the town travel team and the women came like flies.

  He played guard and averaged twelve points a game. The local weekly did a story on him — Brendan’s dad saved the clipping as he saved all the clippings, prouder to have a jock for a son than a president. His dad forbade him to play football, citing fear of injury but really wanting one season of his son’s afternoon company, spring and summer being taken by baseball. So in autumn Brendan was nothing except what every boy was, a working man’s son, which went about as far with the hot girls as good grades and baby fat.

  When the bell rang, he grabbed his knapsack and gave chase to his beloved, who glided amid the hallway’s crush of kids like a princess among untouchables. He closed on her. “Wait up wouldja! I been tryin — ” Charm was the plan but “Yah!” came out instead. He crashed into her and they fell to the floor. The crowd parted around them. Rainy shoes trampled to litter papers flung from her briefcase. This had gone wrong: A boy named Ernie Flipp had been stalking Brendan since homeroom and spying an opening had cut across the hall and socked him in the gut. It was a game they played, and this meant Ernie was ahead. Brendan coughed for air as the girl crawled about stuffing papers in her briefcase, a bootprint at the hem of her dress. He crawled over to help. In perfect third-generation American she spat at him lividly, “Get away you! I don’t like you and you smell bad, really bad, like something dead!” Even under the circumstances this took him aback. He sniffed his hands and arms. It was true. He smelled like something dead — the quahogs he’d shucked for ten bucks a bucket yesterday, the lobsters he’d helped his dad deliver last night, chores after which he’d collapsed in bed without taking a shower, too tired this morning to care.

  As he skulked away someone behind him said, “You want your bookbag back? You dropped it.” It was a dark-haired girl in a black linen jumpsuit. Also a new kid, she was not exactly not pretty, but pity, mockery, there was something in her face that made him want to hit it. He snatched his knapsack without a word. Scrubbing in the boy’s room he reexamined his feelings for the Asian girl, the snotty chink — the slant, the slope, and, too, there was a name his dad used with particular venom, which, as it seemed the meanest insult, made her most of all a gook.

  A girl named Amy was in the lobby when Brendan loped by. She was chubby, yes, but this was balanced by very large breasts which to Brendan transcended fashion. Her breasts seemed to beckon him as he chatted with her, visibly swelling like Jiffy Pop poppers under his twitchy gaze. He suggested they go to a movie sometime. When she said great he felt very smooth. It occurred to him that real men date girls for their good personality, not for their big breasts, but in his view it really did seem the two went together. He asked Amy to meet him after school. Her smile sealed the engagement.

  Late for Science, he assumed a badboy swagger as he entered the classroom. The teacher, Mr. Morrison, from the deep south originally, scowled, “Young Cochran joins us.” The students were paired at stubby blacktopped science tables. Moving to the back of the room, Brendan passed his nemesis Ernie Flipp. Ernie was the class clown. Their dads had been best friends till Brendan’s quit drinking.

  In the back row were a table empty and a table taken by the dark-haired girl whose face earlier had begged smacking. He chose the empty table. “No, Mista Cochran,” Mr. Morrison said. “You’ll be requirin’ a partner for our various dissections. Please join Miz, ah — ” He scanned the class list. “Miz Munro,” he read, caressing the name as only a southerner can, with grave innuendo. “Miz Araby Munro.”

  Everyone looked at her, this latest member of their lives. Her makeup was artsy, her hair clipped short and bleached on one temple, her complexion urban pale. Brendan counted three earrings in her ear. Three, like an African! She shifted uneasily under the class’s scrutiny, until birdlike she cocked her head and chirped to them all, “Hey kids!” The response was stony. Her face went apple. To Brendan she hissed, “Help me!” He kicked his knapsack across the aisle and took the seat beside her, evidently made mush, like many good men, by this vision of nubile street trash.

  A microscope sat on each table. The subject of the fall term was evolution; students would study amoebas, paramecia, algae, and flatworms. Evolution was Mr. Morrison’s favorite topic; contrary to creationist notions of perfection lost, one thing he knew for sure was that man came from monkey. He indicated the microscope on his desk. “This here’s the focus knob. Can y’all see? Then move up, Mista Flipp! The focus,” he repeated. “Now this you rotate for a bigger lens. You got three to pick from, but careful you don’t crack the slide. The slide,” he said, “clips on like . . . so.” He put his eye to the eyepiece and turned the focus knob. “A child could work this,” he muttered. “Even a damn child.”

  At their table Araby was proceeding to vex Brendan. She’d started making gagging sounds the moment he’d sat down, as if she’d detected something noxious and was trying her utmost not to vomit. Sniff sniff, she went. Ach.

  Casually he passed his hand under his nose, smelling but washroom Ivory. Sniff sniff. Ach. “You okay?” he whispered.

  Up front, Mr. Morrison was battling his microscope, squinting through white fog for a violet-strained hydra. “The hell!”

  Sniff sniff, went Araby back at their table. She smelled her science book, her shirt, Brendan’s. Ach.

  Frantically he sniffed too, himself then her, her scent tobacco and flowers. “What?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know, can’t you smell it? It’s disgusting, like, like . . . ”

  He gave himself to the ax. “Like what?”

  “Like something dead!”

  “There’s the bugger!” Mr. Morrison twisted his microscope’s focus knob and the descending lens snapped the slide in two.

  Araby shook with devil-mirth. Brendan exploded, “What’s your problem!”

  Mr. Morrison’s head lifted. A glass splinter winked beside the microscope. “Who wants to know?”

  Brendan gaped at him. The class was rapt.

  “You got an opinion here, boy?”

  He said nothing.

  “Miz Munro? . . . Don’t be shy, girl. We’re all friends here.” Getting no answer, Mr. Morrison suggested they step into the hall and return when their chat was concluded. Neither budged. “Get out!” They jumped. But the door had barely shut behind them when Araby spun and opened it. She glared at Brendan, entered the room, and slammed the door. He heard his classmates marvel at her quick recovery and felt a worse loser than ever.

  Rejoining the class, he plunked himself down like a dog at heel. Friendless. At sea. He longed for basketball season when everyone liked him and he didn’t have to do anything. The students had begun examining prepared microscope slides. Araby passed these through their microscope, not allowing him even a peek. In private school she’d studied this stuff last year; soon she tired of plant tissues and fly wings. She told Brendan she wanted to see his saliva.

  “Forget it.”

  “As you wish.” She removed a blank slide from the box and let pour upon it a slender strand of spit. Brendan was mesmerized. The microscope had a double eyepiece. She adjusted the view. “There. Now look.” He slid his chair over and peered through the holes. Her scent was everywhere. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  It was. At the bottom of the scope’s dark well an ocean of bubbles glimmered with bright light. They were suspended various as soapsuds, edges shot blue-green like sea glass or the glass spheres fishermen once used to float their nets, except those are rare and these were thousands, more than you’d find on all the beaches in all the world. She turned the knob. “Keep watching.”

  “Everything went blurry.”

  “I need to see. Scoot over.” Next thing he knew, they were sharing the mi
croscope, his eye to one hole, hers to the other, cheek to cheek. Her dangling earrings tickled his face. He hoped she couldn’t hear his heart roar.

  Araby turned the knob slowly. As the point of focus changed, she and Brendan coursed through the bright bubbles as if by submarine, far ones appearing as near ones blurred and vanished. She wiped the slide dry with a Kleenex. “Now show me yours.”

  He spat on the glass and they checked the result. His saliva was sudsier, and where hers was blue-green his was reddish, as if not a lightbulb but a dying sun illuminated the spheres. Araby explained, “Everyone’s is different. Blood too. Blood is great.”

  “Blood?”

  She fished a safety pin and plastic lighter out of a purse little bigger than a glasses case strung like a powder horn on a long cord over her shoulder. Keeping them low behind the table, she sterilized the pin in the lighter’s flame and handed it to Brendan. The tip was black. “Try it.”

  “Right.”

  With an air of taxed patience she positioned her finger over the slide, pressing the pin to its tip. Brendan snatched it away and might have driven the point through his palm had she not seized his arm. She was laughing. “You are so gullible!”

  He blinked in confusion. “I was only trusting you.”

  “Don’t.”

  On the way to their next class he pursued her slavishly. “I’m on the basketball team. And the baseball team. I start.”

  “I’m from New York. I don’t like sports. I like artists and actors.”

  “I acted! I was Joseph in the Christmas play. Joy Vesca was Mary and a lightbulb was the baby Jesus.”

  “Look. I’m involved with someone from home. A senior. I don’t want a boy like you.”

  “You might feel different someday.”

  “I’ll be gone in four months.”

  “Maybe you’ll be with me by then. Maybe Penscot’ll be your home.”