by Paul Watkins
All my free afternoons I lived in the dingy developing room with another boy named Ronald Bartlett. He ran a portfolio business, for people on campus who were trying out as models. He did birthdays, weddings and fraternity parties. Bartlett had spent so many years in darkrooms that he even smelled like developer chemicals.
We worked in the soft glow of red lights. The room echoed with the sound of running taps and the rustle of paper in large plastic trays.
After a few weeks, tiny brown spots began to appear on my skin from the chemicals.
I photographed events for the school newspaper. Sports and charity drives and class reunions. For the first couple of months, I had to borrow a camera from a teacher. The director of photography let me work in the darkroom mixing chemicals and helping people wind their film onto developing spools in the dark. I worked until I had enough to buy a decent camera, an old rangefinder Canon.
I’d go back to my dorm with a batch of prints and hang them on a clothes line strung across my room. Then I’d sit at my desk staring at my other assignments until I had a stomach ache. After that, I’d go out and take more pictures.
The film and developing paper were getting too expensive, even with my darkroom job, so I applied to a real-estate company to take pictures of properties they had for sale. I handed over a portfolio of my best pictures. They said they were looking at a number of applications and would get back to me. A week later, they gave me the job.
The properties were never far from town. I took the bus or walked or borrowed cars and bicycles from friends.
I was in business two weeks before someone stole my camera.
No one had cameras to lend and I couldn’t afford a new one. I phoned the real-estate people and told them it would be a while before I could get hold of a new camera.
They said it was too bad and that they were giving the job to another student, named Bartlett.
Bartlett.
Now and then after the camera disappeared, Bartlett lent me developing paper while I rummaged through old negatives trying to find photos to show in class. He used his own camera all the time and couldn’t lend it to me.
When Bartlett was out working for the real-estate company one day, I went into his locker to borrow some developing paper. The locker was closed with a padlock but I knew the combination because he’d told me it had the same set of numbers as his birthday.
In the locker was the case for my camera. Not the camera. Only the case.
I walked into the empty developing room and sat on the floor, red lights all around. I weighed the case in my hands, feeling the leather texture printed on the black plastic.
Then I began walking to the place I knew Bartlett would be. He was taking pictures of a new block of condominiums at the other end of town. I walked, and after a while I started running.
By the time I reached the condominiums, I was sweating in streams down my face. I still held the case in the knot of my fist.
I found him winding a new roll of film into his camera. I stood sweating and breathing hard in front of him, holding out the case and not able to speak.
His eyes popped when he saw what I was carrying. ‘What were you doing in my locker?’
I tried to slow my breathing so I could talk. ‘Where’s my camera?’
‘How did you get into my locker?’
‘Where the hell is my camera?’
‘My locker and what’s in it is my own business. I suggest you don’t mention to anyone what you just did.’ He finished with the film and snapped the back of his camera shut. He had been crouching over the film to shade it from the sun. Now he stood.
‘Give me back my camera.’ I threw the case in the mud, churned up by work boots and trucks. ‘Give me back my job.’
‘I don’t have your camera. I’m busy. I have to go.’ He turned to leave.
I grabbed him by the arm and spun him around.
He stepped back. ‘Get your hands off me! Don’t you lay a finger on me!’
Over his shoulder, I saw a workman on a half-built roof. He had stopped what he was doing and looked down on us.
‘I’m going to ask you this one time, Bartlett. What did you do with my camera? Where is it now? And why the hell did you take it?’
‘I found the case. I was going to give it back.’
‘When did you find it?’
‘A couple of days ago.’ He sat on the hood of the car and put his foot on the bumper. He blinked fast and his mouth was twitching.
‘You’ve seen me half a dozen times in the last couple of days, and all we talked about was my camera. You took it and you know it. How the hell could you do that? Did you want this job that badly?’ My knees and my elbows were shaking.
‘I applied for this job at the same time you did. It should have gone to me and you know it. I’ve been taking pictures years longer than you have.’
‘You have jobs all over campus.’
‘This is a real job.’
‘Why the hell did you steal my camera? Just tell me why you did it?’
‘Listen to me, Pfeiffer. You have nothing to go on. You have no proof.’
‘This is proof!’ I picked my case out of the dirt and shook it in his face. ‘Right here!’
‘All we have as proof, Pfeiffer, is that you broke into my locker. You took a job that you know should have gone to me. Now I have the job. Why don’t you save up and buy a new camera?’
At first, I didn’t remember hitting him. Suddenly he was just lying in the dirt, blinking up at the sky with blood running slowly from his nose down the side of his face. My knuckles ached, as if they had been pulled apart and stuck back together the wrong way.
It wasn’t for several seconds that I recalled my arm swinging out. I remembered how he had sat there for a moment without moving and I thought I didn’t hit him hard enough. I hadn’t ever hit anyone before. Now he’s going to kill me, I thought. Then he slid off the hood and onto the ground.
I looked up and saw several workmen looking down at me. They muttered to each other.
‘He stole my camera!’ I shouted up to them.
Bartlett still lay on the ground. I picked him up and sat him back down on the hood of his car. He fell off again. Blood from his nose had spread across his face and soaked his collar. He continued to blink straight in front of him.
I put him in the car and drove to the university clinic. While I sat in the waiting room, the campus police arrived.
They took me to their office and I sat opposite an officer who asked me to tell him the story, typing out what I said on a computer.
I tried to speak clearly. I tried to stay calm, sure that as soon as they found out the truth, they’d let me go and no more would be said. But in the back of my mind, I had a sense of things crumbling, of everything falling apart.
In the week leading up to the Executive Committee’s enquiry, I became convinced nothing would happen to me once they found out what Bartlett had done.
On the day, I wore a jacket and tie and sat at the end of a table lined with professors.
The room was high-ceilinged and panelled with dark wood. Footsteps echoed in the hall outside. The place smelled of polish and old tobacco.
Bartlett wasn’t there. I hadn’t seen him all week.
‘Now, James.’ The man at the head of the table was an English teacher named Mr Mahoney. ‘You maintain that Ronald Bartlett stole your camera. Is that true?’
‘Yes. He stole it.’ I fiddled with the top button of my shirt. It was cutting into my windpipe.
‘Can you prove he stole it?’ Mr Mahoney asked all the questions. Six or seven other professors took notes, looking up now and then to see my face as I talked.
‘I found the case for it in his locker.’
‘Ronald Bartlett says you’re lying. He says there wasn’t any case in his locker.’ Mr Mahoney held up a typed statement from Bartlett.
‘I found my camera case in his locker. That’s what happened.’ I lifted my hands from where they re
sted flat on the shiny wood table. I looked at the sweat marks of my palms and fingertips on the polish.
‘Now why would someone who presumably was your friend steal a camera from you?’
‘I guess he was angry he didn’t get the job. I don’t know why he stole it.’ I wondered then if I ever had been friends with Bartlett, if it hadn’t just been me trying to make friends with him all the time.
‘Even if he did steal your camera, what makes you think you have the right to hit him? Why didn’t you come to us?’
‘That would be like running to my mother.’
‘What if you’d killed him, James?’
‘Then he’d be dead, Mr Mahoney.’ None of this was going the way I thought it would.
‘Mr Pfeiffer, you are in a lot of trouble, and if you don’t take us seriously, we will make you take us seriously.’
‘Isn’t anybody going to talk about him stealing my camera?’
‘If we were sure he did steal it, then we’d talk about it, James.’ Mr Mahoney took the cuff links from his shirt and set them on the table in front of him.
I fixed my eyes on the little gold tablets joined by tiny gold chains. Then I looked at the committee, fanning my eyes across their faces.
I said I was telling the truth.
I waited in the hall while they decided what to do.
I stood with my hands in my pockets, acid-stomached and a feeling in my throat as if someone had his hands around my neck.
Then a member of the Executive Committee came out and told me I was being sent away for the remainder of the semester. He said I should consider myself lucky only to get that. Bartlett’s parents had threatened to take me to civil court if I didn’t get kicked out for a semester or expelled altogether.
I had twenty-four hours to be gone.
When I arrived home, I spent a week in my room. Mostly I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling.
My parents didn’t blame me for hitting Bartlett.
‘But this could have been avoided!’ my father said over and over until Mother told him to say something different for a change.
I caught him staring at me sometimes, a worried look on his face. I knew he thought I’d got kicked out of college on purpose, the same as at St. Regis summer school.
At the end of the week, my father brought me to the East Bay Plant.
I started living in the ice room.
I started talking to the fish.
Three
When the East Bay Plant closed down and Vic Vogel had run away to the Bahamas, I went back to working for Gunther.
‘Where’s Kelley?’ I asked at the dock. ‘Doesn’t Kelley work here anymore?’
They told me Gunther had caught him stealing fish and fired him.
Kelley was gone. A crewman on a trawler now. Working the deep-sea boats.
I thought of the trawlers as I rode out with Gunther each morning.
Kelley always said he’d work off-shore.
My father practically lived out there. The more I thought about it, the more angry I became. It didn’t seem possible to me that he would return and keep returning to a job he said he hated.
I thought about rumours of strange things that happened out to sea. Rumours of killer whales suddenly surrounding a boat in places where killer whales had not been seen before. Rumours of old ships that whole crews saw with their eyes but that never showed on radar. Rumours of boats on which crews heard singing in the fog, but, again, nothing ever showed on radar.
It seemed to me that my father had found something so precious he couldn’t bear to share it with his sons.
When the Glory B next left port and I knew there would be no chores for me at home, I started walking after work to a fish house named Sabatini’s on Severn Street. The trawlers tied up there. It was only a short walk from Gunther’s.
I asked anyone I could find if there was a place for me on a boat. I was honest. Told them I had no experience.
The trawlermen weren’t rude to me. They told me to come back tomorrow.
When I came back the next day either they had left the dock to make another trip or they told me again to come back tomorrow.
Soon nothing else mattered except finding a job on a trawler. I had no idea what my parents would do to me if I went out to sea. I wasn’t thinking about it.
The next time I walked on the dock, I told the trawlermen I knew how to fish, careful only to ask at boats I hadn’t checked with before.
I lied all the time for days.
The only ship that would take me was a wooden-hulled scalloper named Ocean Horse. It was run by three Portuguese men.
The woodwork had been scraped into garbage and never repainted or refinished. The steel rigging was corroded. Brown bubbles of rust showed through the oily black paint.
The captain and two other men were splicing the dredge cable when I walked on and asked for work.
The captain told me to splice the cable for a while and he’d think about it.
I started to splice and an hour later when the crew took their lunch break, I was still splicing.
The men came back three hours later, checked the cable and said it looked all right. Then they told me they didn’t really need a crewman and burst out laughing.
I told them if they didn’t give me a job after all this work, I’d unsplice every damn piece I threaded while they were gone. And I tried to look out of my head, so they’d believe I might actually do it.
I stood looking down at my boots, hands cramped into fists, while their laughter sounded across the dock.
Then the captain told me to be on the boat at ten o’clock that evening because they were leaving on the night tide. I was walking away from the dock when a man drove up on a· motorcycle and asked if I’d just signed on to work for the Portuguese.
He cut the engine on his machine and scratched at the blond tufts of hair under his armpits. He wore Buddy Holly glasses with thick lenses, and after he’d gone, the only thing about his face I could remember were the glasses. ‘I’ll tell you, you don’t want to work for them.’
‘I want to work for anybody. If you can get me a job on another boat, I’ll take it.’
‘Well, maybe I can’t do that, but I’m telling you, no one wants to work on that boat because they lost a man overboard two weeks ago and didn’t even try to save him. That’s just the way the fucking Portagees are. See the way they was laughing at you? That’s the way they was laughing when the man went overboard.’
‘Where’s the man now?’
‘Hell. I don’t know. Floating around off Martha’s Vineyard, I guess. If he floated. They can’t get anyone to work for them, and there’s good reason for it. Just don’t go.’
I walked to Gunther’s in the rain. I asked him for some time off.
‘How come?’ He sat in his office, gnawing on a sandwich. The floor was ankle-deep with old receipts.
‘I found myself a job on a trawler.’
He nodded, chewing. ‘And you want me to give you back your job if it doesn’t work out. Is that it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Did you lie to the crew?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I lied too, my first time on a trawler.’ He grinned. ‘I wasn’t much older than you.’
‘So you’d take me on again?’
‘Six a.m. on the dock. Same as always.’
‘Thank you, Gunther.’
He went back to eating his sandwich.
Only my brother Joseph was home when I called.
I asked him to tell Mom and Dad I’d be home in a week.
‘How come you want to make trouble?’ He talked over the sound of television in the background.
‘I was offered a job and I’m taking it.’
‘You’re making trouble, James.’
‘Will you tell them for me? I just want to see for myself. Dad can’t grudge me that.’
‘He can and he will.’
I stood with my head tucked under the tiny roof of t
he phone stand, shielding myself from the drizzle.
‘Please deposit fifty cents.’
‘I have to go, Joseph. I’ll see you in a week.’
‘All right. Pray for mercy when you get home.’
‘You pray for me, too.’
Fog on water in the night.
I watched squid jetting up from under the dock, into the glare of the work lights, then jetting down again.
The Portuguese didn’t show up at ten. Not by midnight, either.
Sitting on a crate next to the boat, I peeled strips of wood from the rotten bow. I made up my mind that if no one showed by two, then it would mean they were playing another joke on me. I promised myself I’d break all their windows, snap off their radar mast and do any other damage that came to mind before I ran away and never came to the docks again. The thought of going home without a job made me miserable.
I was asleep on my face on a pile of old fishnet when someone set his boot on the back of my head and pressed down.
‘I don’t have any money.’ I said each word slowly and clearly.
The Portuguese captain took his boot off my head and rolled me over with his toes.
I helped carry groceries on to the boat. Potato sacks filled with sweet bread rolls. Cans of fava beans and iced tea. Spaghetti sauce. Liverwurst.
The captain grabbed up the bundle of my waterproof gear and threw it in the bunk underneath his. He told me his name was Tony. The engineer was also named Tony. The third Portuguese crewman didn’t tell me his name. He only told me he was tough and I should watch it. He was short, with arms too long for his body and a chin like a brick with a thin strip of skin stretched over the edges.
The last I saw of Newport was a cluster of lights on the horizon, falling in twos and threes into black water. Five minutes later, I could no longer remember the direction back to land.
Captain Tony pulled me by the elbow out of my bunk at four in the morning and said it was time to work.
I choked on his breath.
I didn’t find out until after I made it back to port exactly how the dead man died. They had me doing the same thing that killed him.
