by Paul Watkins
‘You said it was a shame about us.’
‘It was. Maybe if you’d run a little faster, it wouldn’t still be a shame.’
‘It doesn’t have to be.’
‘Oh, it does, James. It absolutely does.’
‘All these years.’ I remembered the dozens and dozens of tiny fights she and I used to have. Never big fights. Never fights that decided something. Only little fights that stopped us speaking for days at a time.
‘All these years.’ She repeated what I said, then lit her cigarette and waved the matchstick in front of her until the dot of flame collapsed into smoke.
I knew if we kept on talking like this, there would be yet another fight. I sat back and drained the last milky trickle of tea from my cup. Then I set the cup carefully back on its china saucer. ‘So how’s living with your uncle?’
‘Good. My uncle got me a great summer job.’
‘Which is?’
‘I work up at the Tennis Hall of Fame. It’s easy. It’s better than working at the East Bay Plant.’ She reached across, took my teacup, then realised it was empty and set it back on the saucer. ‘I have to admit you aren’t dressed like a Gatsby boy. What are you doing in Newport?’
‘Working on a boat.’
‘Off-shore?’
I nodded and pressed my lips together.
‘Did your dad make you?’
‘No, this time he didn’t. I’m trying to earn enough money to buy my own boat. Just a small one to start with.’
‘I thought you were going to school.’
‘I was until recently.’ I caught the waitress’s eye.
She held up a full pot of coffee and raised her eyebrows.
I nodded, and before I realised what she was doing, she had filled my teacup with coffee.
Emily frowned at the girl. ‘He was drinking tea.’
‘He was?’ The waitress looked from her to me to my cup. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Let me get you another.’
‘That’s fine. Really.’ I took a packet of sugar and shook it.
‘It’s no trouble.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ I stirred the sugar into my coffee and opened two little tubs of cream that the waitress set in front of me.
‘Were you waiting for someone?’ Emily pulled her ear lobe.
I shook my head and smiled. ‘Would you like some lunch?’
She sat back. ‘Yes. Let’s go someplace nice for lunch.’
‘You name a restaurant and I’ll take us there.’
‘I have a boyfriend.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I have a boyfriend, so you might not want to take me out to lunch. I mean, he and I are living together at the moment, and I thought I ought to tell you … that.’
I should have run faster, I was thinking. If you had run a little faster, you stupid dock boy, this wouldn’t have happened. Now there you are with no way to back down. ‘I just want to have lunch. I’ll take your boyfriend out too if you want.’ I tried to look sincere.
‘I just thought I ought to tell you. No offence.’ She laughed loudly, the way I remembered she did when she felt embarrassed.
We walked down to the Brick Market and did not hold hands.
Her earrings were tiny gold maple leaves.
‘How’s your father?’ I watched her from the corner of my eye.
‘I don’t really know. My uncle said he’s fine and still in the Bahamas. But how he knew that he wouldn’t tell me. My mother has probably tanned herself into a fritter by now.’
‘Do you miss them?’
‘Sure. But he’s a crook and I’ve known that for a long time and I’m not surprised things turned out this way.’
A man walked up from behind. He stepped in front of us and blocked the way. ‘Where you going, Em?’
‘Hi!’ she yelled, embarrassed again. ‘Hi, Rex!’ She lunged at his shoulders and squeezed his arms to his body.
The man raised his hands slowly to her back and I could tell he was confused.
Emily wheeled around and grabbed my hand. ‘This is Pfeif! He’s a friend from high school. He works on a boat and we were just going out for some lunch.’
The man named Rex snapped out of his confusion and shook my hand with a look on his face that said, ‘I didn’t mind you walking down the street with my girlfriend just then.’ He had on blue trousers, a white shirt and a blue tie. Pinned to his chest was a plastic tag with REX stamped on it.
He managed a convenience store. He had been crossing the nearby street to find some lunch when he saw us walk past.
‘I got lucky and they made me manager,’ said Rex.
‘Well, listen.’ Emily took us both by the elbow and led us down the street. ‘James offered to take us out to lunch. We were just heading over to the Boathouse. Why don’t you come along and listen to us talk about how boring it was at our high school?’
The Boathouse, I thought. That’s about the most expensive place in town.
‘Oh. I only …’ Rex’s chin edged back into his jaw.
‘Come along. Really.’ I pressed my palms together to show it was already settled, wishing he would come up with an excuse not to join us.
‘I only … You guys … I really appreciate …’ Sometimes Rex looked at us as he spoke and sometimes he stared off into space as if trying to read cue cards that kept changing in the distance. ‘Are you the guy who worked at the fish house?’
‘That’s me. Now I’m working on a trawler.’
‘Maybe we’ll be eating some of your fish for lunch!’
‘Actually I work on a scallop dragger.’
‘Well, I’ll make sure I order scallops, then. Real nice of you to have us out like this.’
The Boathouse was an old ship that had been permanently docked and turned into a restaurant. The floors lay at an angle because of the shape of the boat, and some of the chairs had one leg shorter than the other to balance out.
Rex was older than both of us. He asked questions about the trawlers and kept his eyes fixed on me when I answered.
He said there wasn’t much to being a convenience store manager and I believed him and we left it at that.
I had become used to swearing on the Grey Ghost, and my sentences sounded empty without them. Brief, blurred scenes rattled through my head as I guessed at how Emily and Rex might have met.
Once during the meal, when Rex had been talking too long and was shovelling at his food to catch up with us, I looked Emily in the face and mouthed, ‘Remember me?’ It happened very quickly.
She looked down at her plate for a second, but it was only a second and I couldn’t be sure she had noticed at all.
Paying the bill, I tried not to think about the money I’d earned walking the deck, cutting scallops and butchering the monk, turned into the undersized portions slid in front of us at our restaurant table.
Rex said to stop by the convenience store any time.
Emily told me to call her when I next came into port.
I didn’t want to walk all the way back to the dock with them, so I said I had to make a call. I stood at the phone booth outside the restaurant and told them to go ahead without me. I smiled and nodded goodbye and held the receiver to my ear.
They waved and walked away.
The receiver buzzed. I pressed a few numbers, hearing the different beep tones. Then a recorded woman’s voice asked me to hang up and dial again.
Just as Emily and Rex turned the corner, I saw him bend down and whisper to her. She laughed and ran her fingers through his hair.
I booked a room at the Y. It was clean, with linoleum on the floor and khaki-yellow walls. My window looked out over the bus stop and the taxi men.
Sitting on the bed, I caught my vague reflection in the window pane. Spices from the lunch still burned at the back of my mouth. My bones felt heavy in my skin, ribs like rusty iron bars weighing on my lungs.
That was a pleasant lunch, I said to myself. Oh yes, James, that was a very pleasant lunch. Oh, fuck me, that w
as pleasant.
I sat on my bed watching the sun move across the dull walls until it died. I did not sleep, or blink, or move.
The desk attendant from downstairs knocked on my door. He said a man named Kelley had seen my name on the check-in list and wanted me to meet him outside Gunther’s at midnight.
I stood on Gunther’s dock, smelling the dampness of fog in the harbour. Fish scales caught the light of street lamps and winked at me as I paced on the soggy dock boards.
Laughter sounded from the hulked boat moored at Gunther’s where the wash-ups lived. A couple or seconds later, a man in jeans crawled out of a hatch and stood on the deck.
I stayed very still, knowing the shadows would hide me.
The man threw a bottle high above the water. It cartwheeled over the mast of a moored sailboat, the glass catching light, before it slapped into the black water.
Kelley showed up wearing a child’s birthday party hat. He’d won it for being one of the first ten customers at a bar up the road. He asked if I wanted to go drinking with him.
A bouncer at the door of the bar carded me and I couldn’t get in, being twenty, one year under the legal drinking age.
Kelley said for me to meet him around back by the washrooms and he’d get me in through a window.
‘Why can’t we just go to Mary’s, Kelley? I know I could get a drink there.’
He didn’t listen and barged through the crowd.
I crept up a stinking alley between the bar building and the one next door. Mossy brick rose up around me, blotting out the sky. Garbage cans with lids chained to the bases were stacked on either side.
Kelley stuck his face up to a small rectangular window and lifted the glass, which was opaque with steel wire in a grid built into the pane.
‘Think you can make it through this?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
His head went away for a moment, hands staying locked in the window frame. He was thinking. Then his eyes slid into view again. ‘Why don’t you meet me at Mary’s in an hour? I had to pay six bucks cover charge to get in here and I don’t want to waste it.’
I sat in the all-night laundromat and washed my clothes. It was too bright and the air felt sticky. The whole time I thought about Mrs Pittsley sitting in one of the orange plastic laundromat chairs, reading gossip papers and being spied on by the detective.
I didn’t go to Mary’s. The minute hand on my watch eased up to the hour, then past it, and my clothes were still in the dryer. I doubted if Kelley would show anyway.
*
At nine-thirty in the morning, the door to my room at the Y blew open and Kelley walked in.
First I thought I was back on the boat and that everyone had left the bunk room but me. I had missed my food time and would have to go straight out on deck. My stomach felt suddenly empty.
Then I realised where I was.
Kelley sat on the window sill. He opened the window and sniffed at the breeze. ‘Sorry I didn’t make it to Mary’s.’
I didn’t tell him I wasn’t there either.
He told me he had found himself a girl.
It was probably a lie. I asked myself if he knew how unbelievable his stories were sometimes.
Every morning when I worked with him at Gunther’s, I had to listen to the story of his night before, hearing him swear he spent the time in a hotel even though a dozen others had seen him drunk and asleep on the dock.
I let him tell his story, laughing now and then as if disgusted, so as not to hurt his feelings.
It seemed to me that fishermen were always lying about girls.
I heard lies about most things on the docks.
Lies from people who said they were there only for a couple of weeks so they could make some extra money but who had been fishing for years.
Lies from wash-ups who said they had just bought a boat and would be putting it in the water any day now. They’d talk to me as if I had a chance of being on their crew if I played my cards right. I fell for it several times at the beginning, doing their jobs while they snuck off to a bar. I was surprised they could keep it up, lying all the time and believing it and expecting others to believe it too.
Kelley explained to me at the time that it was all these people had. If they didn’t keep up the lie to everyone and themselves, then they’d have to face the fact that they should have retired years before and be living on pensions. But they didn’t have pensions. Probably they didn’t have more than a couple of hundred in the bank, if they had a bank account at all. Most likely they were the same as Kelley, and kept their money stashed in Tupperware boxes.
‘You try thinking how it would be,’ he told me, ‘with nothing to lean back on and your body all falling apart with old age. You’d be lying too.’
I didn’t care. Someone had to show them what thin-air talkers they were. I wanted to pull the plug on all those wash-ups and see them deflate on to the deck of Gunther’s boat as they rode out at six each morning, the air filled with a smell of eucalyptus ointment, which they used to kill the pain of arthritis in their joints.
‘You bear up,’ said Kelley. ‘Let the poor bastards say what they want.’
So I let the wash-ups talk the same way I let Kelley talk.
Sometimes I wanted to pull the plug on him, too.
The Patriot Hotel served a buffet brunch. All a person could eat for twelve dollars.
It was cold in the lobby. Gold-painted marble pillars held up the ceiling. The marble itself seemed to be sending out the chill.
We walked up a flight of stairs to a banquet hall painted cream with blue trim.
Kelley came here as often as he could, amazed that it was possible to eat and keep eating with no one allowed to stop him or charge him extra. He pointed to a row of tables decked with food. ‘The way they do it is start you at the left and you file down the line and when your plate is full you go to your seat and start eating. They try to fill you up on pancakes and bread so you don’t have room for the good stuff. See the way all the pancakes are at the front, and see the way they try and put some on your plate without you even asking? This is the way we do it.’ He walked to the wrong end of the line and shoved his plate in the face of a man who wore a chef’s hat and white apron. ‘Let me have some of them trout almandine. And some for him, too.’ Kelley took my plate and stood with both arms extended while the server piled on food.
At the end of the meal, when our waitress asked if we wanted any more coffee and we said no, she wrote out a bill and stood waiting for us to pay.
I looked at the black bow tie knotted at her throat.
Kelley pulled a roll of money out of his pocket. He flipped through hundreds and twenties and tens.
The waitress watched the money. Her eyes were stuck to it.
Kelley gave her thirty dollars and told her to keep the rest. When she was gone, he leaned over to me. ‘First couple of times I came in here with my boat money and dressed the way I am, they thought I stole it. I remember seeing the manager holding up one of my bills. He was trying to see if it was real. They’re used to me now, though. They think I own one of the mansions out on Ocean Drive.’
I had been thinking about money.
Suddenly money was everything. Every gesture, every move was not safe or possible without money. I was not a man unless I brought home a salary. I lacked promise unless somebody thought I’d be bringing in dollars further down the road.
It seemed to me that all I had learned in school was how to make money. Any class that didn’t tell me directly, told me indirectly. Teaching me the attitude. Giving me connections.
I got tired of that, the same way I became tired of working for Gunther and Vic. I wondered how long it would be before I was tired of working for Gil. I wanted to work for myself. It didn’t seem too much to ask.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realised I was wrong. It was a lot to ask. I saw it was what everybody wanted. It would be years and years of working for Gil or for someone else before
I could work for myself. The weight of it pressed on my skull. Money. It was all about money.
I thought of the television preachers who said it was possible to live without wealth. They made their sermons, and at the end of the show they asked for what little money I did have so they could go on saying how I could be happy without it.
But I never met or heard about people who could be happy for long without money or who were made happy by something that didn’t cost.
If it wasn’t the fact of holding the money in their hands, it was the idea of turning the dollars into something else. Land. Food. Possessions.
I guessed maybe the Buddhist monks I studied in school had no money, and I supposed there was something to what they preached about not needing wealth, about needing only the ability to bend in the wind like a willow tree. But nothing I was ever taught and ever saw put to use had anything to do with bending like a willow tree.
I should always have known what I wanted.
I was angry at my father for pushing me toward a way of life he did not understand. He only had a picture in his head.
And I was angry at my brother for trying to live in the picture, in his brown suit that made him look blurry at the edges like a 3-D baseball card. In the end I was only angry at myself for not having figured it out sooner.
All afternoon we worked on the Grey Ghost, repairing the dredge bags and welding parts that had come loose.
I watched Nelson welding, the way he fitted new welding rods into the grip of the welder and tapped them on the metal deck until they sparked. He worked with a heavy black mask over his face, lifting it now and then to see the work. The crackling flame of his welder was blue in the centre and frothing magnesium-white at the edges.
I shouldn’t have watched. In the evening, my eyes began to hurt as if salt had been rubbed into them. I washed them out, thinking it had to be some chemical, but the burning didn’t go away.
Franklin saw me sitting at the galley table with my thumbs dug into my eye sockets, while everyone else was up at Mary’s having a last drink before we left port. He told me the pain came from burning out some inside part of my eye with the brightness of the welding flame. He chopped up some raw potato and made me pack it on to my eyes. The starch in the potatoes would ease the hurt, he said.
