Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn

by Paul Watkins

  This made him work even more slowly, and often his meals were cold by the time he got to eat them.

  I saw his hands as he stirred them in the scallop meats. The cuts looked deep and bled in slivers across his egg-white palm.

  I took a pair of new gloves from my locker, telling myself I could stretch out a pair over another couple of days without ruining my hands.

  When Marco had gone to sleep, I rolled the gloves in a ball and put them in the pocket of his rain gear. I didn’t want him to think I was doing him any favours. Didn’t want to make the gesture. I hoped he’d just shut up and wear them, because I couldn’t bear to see his hands in such a mess.

  Every day around four in the afternoon we heard a bang in the sky.

  We saw nothing. The sound punched our ears and shuddered away across the water.

  Gil said it was Concorde coming down from the sound barrier on its way in from London or Paris.

  While we sat at the galley table after dinner, eating a whole bag of cookies, I told Kelley what I had read in a magazine article, that the shock of a plane crossing the sound barrier was strong enough to break all the windows in a town, which was why Concorde slowed before it reached the coast.

  Kelley pointed half a cookie at me and said I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  ‘No, I believe that’s true.’ Gil arranged his cookies in little piles. We had divided them out equally from the package. Gil ate two in each mouthful.

  ‘Then how come the portholes aren’t busted?’ Kelley squinted across the table at us, hurt that we were ganging up on him.

  I tried to remember exactly what I’d read. ‘It’s still too far away to break the windows. It has to be right overhead.’

  ‘Gil, I can’t believe you’re agreeing with Pfeif when you know plain as day he’s lying.’

  ‘Calm down, Kelley.’ Gil nibbled on his last cookie and then looked around to see which of us might give him some of ours. ‘I read it in an article. That’s probably where Pfeif read it too.’

  ‘That’s right.’ I slapped Kelley on the arm. ‘It’s common knowledge about the sonic boom.’ Gil’s agreeing with me even on this small thing let me think for the first time that my job on the crew might be safe.

  We all turned our heads to the door.

  Shouting on deck.

  Gil ran outside, his hands balled into fists.

  I stood with Kelley in the doorway, peering through the glare of sunlight on the water. Nelson was trying to hold Pittsley back from attacking Marco. He pressed his palms against Pittsley’s chest and yelled, ‘Gennuhmen, pleez!’

  ‘He’s a thief! He’s wearing my gloves and he stole them from my locker. This time it’s for sure. This time I really will kill him!’

  Pittsley’s only a coward, I thought to myself. If he wanted to, he could push past Nelson in a second and be at Marco’s throat. But there he is making threats and letting himself be held back by someone nearly half his size.

  I walked to the area where we put our boots and oilers when we knocked off duty, and saw the neat blue ball of new gloves that I’d left for Marco lying under a fire extinguisher. It seemed he hadn’t noticed them when he put on his rain gear, and didn’t see the gloves fall out. So whatever gloves he wore now belonged to someone else.

  ‘Did you steal them, Marco?’ Gil sat down on the ice hatch and sighed, ready to judge.

  ‘No. I didn’t steal nothing. I bought these myself.’ Marco stepped forward and stuck out his chest. He wiggled his fingers in the gloves.

  ‘Oh, you did?’ Pittsley scratched at his chin, scheming. ‘You bought those yourself?’

  ‘Muh-huh.’ Marco nodded, eyes narrowed, trying to read Pittsley’s mind. The gloves looked enormous on his hands. The shiny, unreal blue of a postcard sky.

  ‘Well, if you’re right, then I’m sorry. I will apologise. I will apologise to everyone and you won’t get any more trouble from me.’ Pittsley folded his arms.

  Marco’s eyes opened a little as he thought of the chance that Pittsley might leave him alone for the rest of the trip.

  I caught sight of Reynolds. He had come out of the wheelhouse and stood on the bridge looking down. I could see the worry on his face.

  The sudden quiet on deck made me nervous. I didn’t trust it, and stepped back back behind Kelley, who had stepped back a second before. I felt the sweat slide in my boots.

  Pittsley touched the tips of Marco’s fingers. Then he pulled the gloves off in one movement and handed them to Gil. ‘Look under the wristband there, Gil.’

  Gil took the gloves, rolled back the wristband and read out ‘DP. Now I’m going to ask you one more time again if you stole these gloves, boy.’ Gil handed the gloves to Pittsley, looking all the time at Marco.

  Pittsley held the gloves carefully, as if they were something alive that had to be cared for.

  ‘I got to have gloves! My hands are all cut up.’ Marco raised his palms and showed us the scars.

  Gil held his face close to Marco’s and said quietly, ‘It doesn’t matter what you need. You don’t steal on my boat.’ Gil climbed the ladder to the bridge.

  Reynolds waited for Gil to reach the top of the ladder, then approached him and opened his mouth to speak.

  Gil didn’t wait for him to talk. He aimed a finger over the mate’s shoulder. ‘Get in the fucking wheelhouse!’ Then he turned and yelled down at Marco. ‘What happens to you now is none of my business!’

  I followed Kelley and Howard back into the galley, feeling the sun on my neck and smelling diesel blown down on us by gusts of wind. I had the same acid taste in my mouth as when I once saw a policeman shoot a horse that had run out of a field into traffic and been hit by a truck.

  ‘Pittsley’s a coward.’ I sat with Kelley at the galley table. My legs were braced against the table legs to stop myself from sliding with the pitch of the boat.

  Kelley looked up from his magazine. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘He’s a coward.’

  ‘He used to be a Green Beret man. He spent six months in Laos and another six months blowing up and down the Mekong Delta on a hovercraft. Don’t try telling me he’s a coward. He’s a hell of a guy.’

  I already knew Pittsley had been in Vietnam. He wore a green T-shirt with ‘Special Forces’ written in yellow on one side. On the other side was ‘Live Brave. Die Strong.’ I stared at Kelley. I couldn’t understand why he stuck up for Pittsley when it seemed obvious to me the man was out of his mind. ‘If he’s such a hell of a guy, Kelley, why does he stand around muttering to himself?’

  Kelley slapped down the magazine. On its cover was a picture of a woman tied to a chair with a gag on her mouth, and above her, in bright yellow letters, True Detective.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about, Kelley. The man has whole conversations with himself.’

  Pittsley liked to stand on the lazarette hatch and stare out across the water.

  Sometimes he stayed there long after the others on his watch had gone to bed, rolling his hips to keep steady in the motion of the waves.

  He just stood there and talked. It looked as if bubbles were rising from his lungs and pushing their way out through his mouth. His lips curled around the bubbles as they escaped.

  Once, as I stood waiting with the hammer to knock out the pins, I edged over to hear what he was saying. I sidestepped closer and closer, ready to turn when he turned, to make it look as if I were minding my own business.

  There were no words I could make out. Only a constant muttering, like the drone of a bee.

  Kelley sat back and sighed. ‘It isn’t his fault.’

  I realised then that for the crew to treat Pittsley as well as they did, there must have been some bad time he went through in the past, something they all went through together, and now they cared for him only out of pity. Kelley was angry with me for what I said. Of all the crew, Kelley liked Pittsley the best. He stood from the table and began to pace across the swaying floor.

  I watched
his broad back underneath the blurred red and black squares of his lumberjack shirt.

  ‘Well he isn’t a hell of a guy!’ I swung my legs and let my heels fall back hard against the floor. When there was no reply, I repeated more quietly, ‘He isn’t.’

  Kelley spun around. ‘If you knew what Pittsley’s been through, you wouldn’t talk that way!’

  I wished I hadn’t opened my mouth. I stared down at the table and picked at the wood with my fingernails.

  Kelley said that Pittsley had been hanging around the docks and fishing before I was even out of first grade. He worked the Mary Louise Q before she went down off Nantucket. He worked the Halifax. Sometimes he went on board as mate, sometimes as cook and sometimes just as crew.

  ‘He could have had his own boat if he wanted it.’ Kelley still paced the floor. Now and then he turned quickly, as if afraid I would sneak out of the room and leave him talking to the wall. When he saw me watching him, he turned away again.

  ‘I’m going to have my own boat.’ I yawned in the stale galley air.

  ‘Everybody says that. Everybody I ever met fishing has told me that. And the boats get bigger and bigger in their heads while they get poorer and worse into being alcoholics and then they end up at Gunther’s. So don’t tell me about your boat until you have it.’

  ‘I have a plan.’

  ‘Keep it to yourself.’

  For a while we didn’t talk. Then Kelley began to tell me how Pittsley’s problems began.

  He had always been paranoid about his wife when he was away from home. Thirty miles offshore in the middle of the night, he’d yell at the men on his watch that he knew she was sleeping with someone else. Right then.

  For a joke, sometimes, the captain would let on that he’d received a message from land, from a friend who said Mrs Pittsley had been seen with another man late at night. The crew would all nod and keep a straight face, say they thought maybe they’d seen her with someone else and even throw in a realistic location to make the story believable.

  Pittsley almost collapsed from the worry in his guts.

  The crew had to stop teasing him, because there was no humour in it any more.

  When the boat reached port, he would get in his car and drive straight home, sure that he could catch her in the act. He’d pay one of the dock boys a hundred dollars to take his place unloading the fish or scallops. People called that Lumping. It was the sign of someone who needed a drink or a dose of drugs too badly to wait an extra couple of hours before the captain dismissed his crew.

  Usually Pittsley’s wife would be down at the laundromat or working with retarded kids at a health centre.

  If she ever stayed out late while he was on land, he rode through town trying to find her. Or he called motels claiming to be a police officer looking for a suspect, and had they by any chance seen a tall woman with frosted blond hair and green eyes.

  He sat by the phone, waiting for a caller who might hang up when Pittsley was the one who said hello.

  In the times when people knew he had begun to lose his mind, Pittsley sat in the dark on a sofa in his house. He wore the shreds of his uniform from Vietnam, a tiger-stripe camouflage jumpsuit with ‘Sin Loi’ in red ink on the back. He set a gun on the table in front of him and waited for the sound of his wife walking up the gravel path with another man.

  ‘I seen it all for myself.’ Kelley sat down, tired of pacing. ‘One time I went by his house to see if he wanted to go out for a drink. I rang the bell a couple of times and nobody answered so I turned to leave. And there he was right behind me, pointing a gun in my face.’ Kelley set his index finger against his forehead. ‘Right in my damn face.’

  Kelley stayed quiet for a minute.

  ‘Of course he said he was sorry afterwards. And I forgave him. But by then he’d already done too much wrong ever to set right again. All his friends gone. Sitting in the dark in his house wearing camouflage. I told him if he was so worried about being away from her he should just work at Gunther’s instead. Be on the water first thing in the morning and be done by noon. I told him everybody knows affairs don’t happen in the morning.’

  Pittsley’s job at Gunther’s was to stand at a conveyor belt which ran from the boat up onto the dock. He sorted the fish. This job was only for the regulars, because it could be done one-handed and half asleep and drunk, while others lugged shovels full of ice across the fish house floor or carried splintery wood crates loaded with the day’s catch to refrigeration trucks.

  Pittsley had been working a shorter time than many of Gunther’s men, but the regulars gave him status because they all knew him. He’d been around Gunther’s before.

  Pittsley’s wife started taking aerobics classes in the studio above Leon’s Dry Cleaning shop.

  It wasn’t long before Pittsley could be found standing under Leon’s neon sign: hum blink LEON’S blink DRY blink CLEANING blink darkness twisted grey glass tubes hum blink LEON’S.

  He always had some excuse to be out at night. Kelley said that when it was over, his wife had almost no idea how paranoid he’d been. He kept it a secret from her and rarely asked where she went, thinking that she’d lie if she wanted to. He tried to keep everything level and calm in their house while he went quietly out of his mind.

  Pittsley watched the heads of the aerobics dancers bouncing in and out of view.

  He didn’t wait there so he could walk her home. He waited so he could follow her. And it was bad news for Pittsley that one night she didn’t just walk home. It was bad news and then again it was what he’d waited for all this time.

  She stood in a bus shelter until a man in a white Mustang picked her up.

  This happened every other night.

  The worry in his guts drained all the colour out of him and made his hands shake.

  He hired a private detective. Her name was DeMico and he hired her because once he knew a man with the same name.

  The DeMico woman sat at her desk, clenching and unclenching a wrist strengthener, and asked Pittsley if he had ever considered the fact that his wife might be taking driving lessons. Had he thought of that? She wanted to know. Did he ever hit his wife? She wanted some facts and she wanted them now.

  Pittsley told the detective that he had a fairly good marriage.

  ‘If you did, you wouldn’t be here snivelling the way you are,’ the detective told him.

  Kelley knew all the details because they appeared in the paper afterward.

  The detective asked Pittsley what he did for a living, and when he told her he was a fisherman, she said he ought to think twice before hiring a detective. She didn’t want to take his money if it was a false alarm. And besides, if Mrs Pittsley ever found out she was being tailed, she’d be pissed and it would take a long time to set right. The DeMico woman guaranteed him that. So did he know for sure what he wanted to do?

  ‘I know what I know,’ Pittsley told her.

  ‘Well, do you know two hundred dollars a day plus expenses?’

  Then Pittsley leaned down, breathed in her face and told her, ‘I know ugliness the rest of the world has never seen.’

  Kelley said he had the paper clippings at home. He cut them out and stuck them in a scrapbook.

  ‘I remember at the time, when he hired the detective,’ – Kelley twisted his hands in the air, looking for words – ‘he acted different. He was moving in fast motion. You’d say hello to him and he’d answer back ‘Fine’ without waiting for you to ask him how he was.’

  For a while the DeMico woman couldn’t find out what was going on. She knew the driver of the car was a man, but no more than that. She met Pittsley every night in a bar to tell him what she didn’t know.

  Mrs Pittsley started asking where he was going in the evenings. He invented some excuses, and when she found out they weren’t true, she slapped him.

  But Pittsley didn’t explode. He stayed calm the way he’d always stayed calm in his house, and he stored away the anger like barrels of explosives behind his ribs.

/>   To keep up the payments to DeMico, Pittsley told Gunther he had a good tip on a horse race and needed an advance on his pay. Gunther decided to lend him the money only if Pittsley would let him in on the tip. So Pittsley gave him two bogus bets for the next week. Gunther made him promise there’d be no mistakes.

  ‘I don’t make mistakes,’ Pittsley told him.

  ‘No. I don’t believe you do,’ said Gunther.

  His wife accused him of having an affair. She demanded to know where he went in the evenings.

  But he still wouldn’t tell her. He had begun to take pleasure in making her feel the way he’d felt all this time.

  He received a call at the dock from the detective, telling him to meet her at a bar in a side road off Severn Street.

  When he got there, the detective bought him a drink and slapped him on the back with her strong hands. His wife had been seeing a psychiatrist. One of her friends at the aerobics club had suggested it, and Mrs Pittsley went.

  ‘You’ve been so wrapped up in your own damn problems and thinking everything was fine at home that you didn’t see she was hurting.’ The detective bought him another drink. ‘So you’ve got some mending to do. Some apologies and rethinking to do.’

  The worry in him slowly drained away. The barrels of explosives dissolved. ‘I’ll make things better now,’ he said.

  A while later, when he and the woman were a little drunk, Pittsley looked up and saw his own car pull up on the pavement outside the bar. Then his wife barged in and walked toward his table.

  Pittsley stood up and held out his arms to hug her.

  Mrs Pittsley smacked him in the head with the barrel of his own service pistol.

  While her husband lay on the floor, she aimed the gun at the DeMico woman, fired and blew her backward off her chair. She set the gun against Pittsley’s chest and yelled, ‘I ought to!’ She looked at the people in the bar and yelled again, ‘I ought to!’

  Pittsley cowered on the floor with his arms covering his head.

  Mrs Pittsley threw the gun away across the bar and sat down at the table. She sat by herself, where Pittsley and the detective had sat, and screamed at the top of her voice, ‘I did it! I came here to do it and it’s done! You can do what you want with me because I’m finished now!’