by Doug Burgess
While Mariana bustles from room to room, Irene drops into the kitchen for a conspiratorial whisper. “Connie thinks we oughta do it tonight.”
“Do…what?” I ask, momentarily nonplussed.
“The Calliope,” she hisses, and instantly turns round to see if anyone—Mariana or Captain Barrow or the Hired Help, presumably—has overheard.
“On Christmas?” I ask, surprised. But Billy is nodding.
“Makes sense. No patrols today. Harbor’s as empty as its ever gonna get. Not even the fleet will be out.”
“Billy’s offered to guard us while we sink her,” I tell them.
The tension, which had been gathering in the house like an electrical cloud, dissipates at once. Billy shrugs, stares down at the linoleum counter, but doesn’t correct me. Irene bestows on him a smile that is all but a promissory note for a lifetime of baked goods deposited on his doorstep every Sunday. But Constance, who materialized at the refrigerator in search of a Pepsi, looks at me. “We?” she asks, eyebrows raised.
“Sure,” I reply. “You think I’m going to let you two have all the fun again?” I point to my new watch, which has already become my favorite possession. “Time’s a-wasting!”
Constance turns to Irene. “I told you we should have just given him the earrings,” she says.
* * *
So it is that we all find ourselves on a piercing midwinter evening out in the bay again, sou’westers tucked up to our chins, wool caps pulled over our ears, leaving only a small cavity of cloth through which to view the spectacle. The Eula May pitches and rocks in the swell, carried by a sharp breeze that searches through our coats like a pickpocket. Grandma is back at the house, sleeping peacefully in her easy chair with an afghan around her knees and Mariana watching nearby. I envy her.
“You set the charges, right?” Constance asks for the third time.
Billy simply nods. The Eula May has towed the Calliope out to a deepish stretch of water off Dolphin Rock. The yacht is still riding high with her cabin and pilot house gone, seemingly suspended in space. Her keel doesn’t touch the water, just glides over it, Grandma had said. The yacht rests on the glassy bay like a white-shrouded body on a funeral bier, waiting for the torches to set it alight.
“Reckon we better get started then,” decides Constance. A small table has been set up on the Eula May’s stern, covered in a tartan blanket. We gather round it, and Constance pulls back the cloth. On the table are a cluster of white and red candles of various lengths, a golden bowl with three oranges, a dragon-shaped incense holder, and two photographs. One is Marcus Rhinegold, cut from the Providence Journal around the time of his disappearance. The other is a Polaroid of the Calliope herself. Constance takes a Zippo from her pocket and solemnly lights the candles. She hands the Zippo to Irene, who puts the flame to four sticks of incense and gives one to each of us. Irene turns to the yacht, silent and ghostly a few yards away, and bows three times, slowly. Constance steps forward and does the same. Billy and I follow, bemused.
“Put the incense in the holder,” Irene whispers. Even as we do so, Constance begins to chant in a low, deep, carrying voice:
“Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhasa, Kusala dhamma, Akusala dhamma, Abyakata dhamma…”
There’s something deadly serious, almost ennobling, in Constance’s chant for the dead. Where she learned the words I can’t imagine. It goes on and on, droning, carried over the water to the dying ship.
“Connie saw them do this in Japan,” Irene explains under her breath, “at the scrapyards in Osaka. They believe every ship has a soul. No Japanese scrapper will touch the hull until it’s been declared officially dead—not respectful. Well, that made sense to Connie. Said she felt sorry for all the ships she tore apart without sending them off first; it was almost like she was gutting them alive. So now we go through this bit of business every time. I dunno. It’s pretty, don’t you think?”
I do. It’s also a side of the Laughing Sarahs I’ve never seen before. I feel like we’re initiates into some dark and secret ritual. We are seeing something rarer than the Awa or Yanomami tribes along the Amazon and just as fragile. Femina Novus Angliae Senes in their dying habitat. Finally, Constance finishes and spreads her hands. At that exact moment, there is a low rumbling from the Calliope. “Watch it!” Billy cries, flinching. A crash answers him, and a tall sheet of flame bursts through the deck. The percussion from the blast reaches us and makes the Eula May shiver in sympathy. Now the Calliope is groaning, a remarkably human sound, heeling over slowly and letting the seawater fill her shattered hull.
“Poor thing,” Irene mutters.
“Told you we should’ve opened the seacocks first,” Constance grumbles. “She’s going down sloppy.”
The Calliope is almost on her beam ends. Loose boards and detritus shattered by the blast tumble into the frothing water. For a moment I imagine her as I first saw her: glittering with lights from stem to stern, paint and brightwork gleaming in the moonlight. I feel Marcus standing beside me now, watching. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, though I don’t know for what.
Anyone who has seen a ship go down always describes the last sound it makes as a weird kind of death rattle. Nobody really knows what causes it: boilers bursting, decks collapsing, pipes exploding as the lower decks fill up with water. Perhaps all of these. But I hear it now: a long, rasping, keening screech. Impossible not to believe it must be made by a living thing. Impossible, too, to think this ship is not experiencing humiliation, even pain, as she surrenders herself to the sea. But her agonies are almost over. The bow disappears, and the Calliope turns almost vertical, plunging and thrashing her way down. A last, long sigh—which might just be air escaping from her vents—and the Calliope is gone. The sea boils for a moment, then goes still. Except for a few bits of floating wreckage, she might never have existed at all. Such is the all-consuming, all-obscuring power of the Atlantic. Marcus Rhinegold and Captain Bilodeaux and Sylvanus Hazard and Wally the Postman—and countless others—all sought its favor, bargained with it, cursed it, blew themselves apart upon its surface, and writhed their way down into its depths. Yet the sea remains absorbed in its own inscrutable affairs, pricking out the music of the tides.
“Well,” says Constance gruffly, “that’s that, then.”
“Goodbye, Marcus,” I say quietly. “I really hope you got wherever it is you wanted to go.”
Constance restarts the engines on the Eula May, which toss up a glutinous bubble in lively defiance. Even the old minesweeper seems to want to put as much sea as possible between herself and what we just witnessed. I wait for a moment on deck, breathing in the frigid air, staring back at the blank piece of ocean where a man’s dreams now lie submerged. It’s then I remember the date: Christmas Day, the same day the General Kearny exploded. Perhaps some watchers on shore were finally gratified by a mysterious orange glow. The Calliope’s death has served a greater legend. How strange, I think to myself, the symmetry of things.
Inside, Irene has turned up the heat in the cabin till it’s almost suffocating. But the warmth is a comfort, as is the hot chocolate she presses into my hand. Life, it seems to say, goes on. And truly, the further we get from the wreck, the more it seems as if all that passed before was just a weird and terrible dream. Marcus, Alicia, the Molinaris—none of them really belonged in Little Compton. Even the Calliope was, after a fashion, swallowed by the General Kearny. The Laughing Sarahs have performed last rites; life can go on as before. Billy is at my side and wraps a protective arm around my shoulders. Irene stares into her mug, lost in thought. Constance begins to sing. It’s an old hymn, and I remember it. Grandpa used to call it the sailor’s prayer, but Grandma said it was what the old drunks sang down at Odd Fellows Hall when they closed out their meeting.
“Dark the night of sin has settled, Loud the angry billows roar!
Eager eyes are watching, longing, for the lights along the
shore…”
Then me and Irene and even Billy join in for the chorus. The words fill the stuffy little cabin like an incantation:
“Let the lower lights be burning, send a gleam across the wave,
Some poor fainting, struggling seaman you may rescue, you may save!”
Just then Constance points out the wheelhouse windows. The spotlights are on at Dowsy’s Pier, and a string of colored bulbs stretches down from the Boy and Lobster. White glittering lights twinkle from a dozen mastheads. These are the lights along the shore, welcoming us in.
Chapter Seventeen
Every New England winter is the longest and worst ever. This is a rule. Nobody can remember one as bad as this; it is definitely worse than when they were a kid; and everyone swears—swears—that this is the year they’re finally moving to Florida.
The worst part is that once Christmas and New Year’s are over, winter is just settling into her stride. January is bitter, February cruel, March unbearable. Daybreak paints the world in a palette of gray, black, white, and beige. You forget colors. Outside, the air is like chalk dust to breathe, and you can’t remember what it is to simply walk around in the sun. Faint stabs at cheeriness—stupid fake holidays like Valentine’s and Presidents’ Day—are ignored. Each day passes like the one before.
Nowhere is this truer than in Little Compton. The whole town is a charcoal smudge: gray skies, gray water, dirty gray snow, gray faces peering out from gray clothes. Every now and again the bay whips itself up into a storm, yet even these are only momentary distractions. I spend my mornings at the gym, afternoons applying for jobs I’ll never get, and evenings watching television with Grandma.
She’s getting worse. Dr. Renzi says not to think of it like that. “The disease,” he told me, “is running its progression. That’s all.” Well, okay, fine. But he doesn’t have to listen to her rant for three hours because she thinks she’s been kidnapped, or cry hysterically because she wanted banana ice cream and got chocolate instead, or wake me up at three in the morning because she’s decided the house is floating away. Even Mariana is exhausted. She’ll only come in the afternoons now, puts headphones on and races through the house, cleaning. I’m grateful for the help, but laundry and dishes are the least of my problems. Constance and Irene do what they can. Constance brings Domino’s and sits with Grandma in front of the television; Irene comes by every now and then and takes her out for a long lunch, to give me a break. They remember things like doctor’s appointments and random bills and dates at the hair salon. It’s hard for them too. Most of the time Grandma still recognizes old friends, but her conversation has gotten wilder. They know it’s not her fault, but one day I watched helplessly as Grandma accused Aunt Constance of sleeping with Grandpa Mike. She called her a bitch and a whore and tried to spit in her face, but her mouth was dry from all the yelling. Constance just sat there, unmoving, unflinching, her lips a thin line. When it was over, she pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped the spittle off Grandma’s face. “Thank you,” Grandma said, demure as a girl. But later I saw Constance lean over the draining board and wipe away tears. “You gotta get her into a facility,” she told me quietly on her way out.
I know I do, but it’s not that easy. Mrs. Everard at the Methodist Home finally did go, but her place was taken by the elderly organ player from the Woonsocket church, much beloved by all and unfortunately healthy enough to last for years. “She still drives,” Constance reports, disgusted. “So what the hell does she need to be in a home for?” Irene calls around, but the Catholics, Episcopalians, Baptists, and even the Jews are full up. “No room at the inn,” says Constance laconically. Everyone is dying, but nobody is dying fast enough.
February brings other, more welcome changes. One morning Irene calls, breathless as usual, and tells me to put on a jacket and tie. I’ve got an interview with the Chair of the URI History Department that afternoon at four. “How?” I ask, dumbfounded.
The answer is long and involved and very Rhode Island. Irene’s second cousin’s husband works in the provost’s office and heard the department was about to post a search for someone that could teach history of gender and sexuality. “That’s you, right?” Irene asks a bit worriedly.
“That’s me.”
So Irene, acting swiftly and stealthily, copied out my CV from an old Xavier web page and sent it along to URI, along with a glowing recommendation from a professor at Brown I’ve never heard of but I suspect must be another of Irene’s very old friends. Now she hands the whole story to me like a birthday present. Oddly enough, it’s only a week away from my birthday.
The interview goes surprisingly well. Clearly Irene has briefed the Chair on the circumstances of my last dismissal. “This is a secular institution, Dr. Hazard,” he tells me seriously. “We tolerate no discrimination of any kind.”
That must be true because a few weeks later, I find out I got the job. Billy takes me up to the Capital Grille. I won’t start teaching till the fall, but at least I won’t have to worry about starving once the food stamps run out. After dinner we celebrate by going to a tattoo parlor on Wickenden Street. The Artist sits by himself behind the counter, playing Candy Crush on his phone. He is about six-four, is bearded, and looks like he might have done professional wrestling. They say he’s the best there is.
“Damn,” Billy mutters, “you sure about this?”
“Yup.”
I’ve been thinking about it for a while. The scars on my chest are smaller now, but they’ll always be there, two flat tombstones over Rosalie’s boobs. I’m sick of looking at them. So one afternoon I started doodling on a pad. Gradually the design took shape: a flush-decked schooner with all sails set, figurehead of Marylee Hazard cleaving through the waves with her arm extended and an arrow in her fist. The waves arc out like eagles’ wings, lifting the bow of the Marylee’s Revenge upward and holding her aloft. For weeks I kept the drawing folded in my coat pocket, pulling it out now and again to add a line here, a detail there. Finally, I showed it to Billy. “What do you think?” I asked tentatively.
He studied it for a long time, fingering his chin. Oh God, I told myself, I’ve gone too butch even for him. “Needs a flag,” he decided finally.
“What?”
“Every proper ship needs a proper flag. Else how’s anybody gonna know who you are? Or what you stand for? You can put it just here”—he indicated the stern—“fluttering out behind.”
I spent all night thinking about it. Then, at about four in the morning, I knew. I pushed Billy aside, as gently as I could, and padded into the kitchen where the markers are kept in a drawer. In a few minutes I had it: a rainbow flag with pink and blue horizontal stripes and, in the center, a skull and crossbones.
Now I pull it from my pocket and hand the drawing, with some trepidation, to the Artist. “What do you think?”
He holds it with both hands like a slice of bread and stares with a quizzical expression. “Two-fifty,” he says at last. “And about three hours. Where d’ya want it?”
“On my ass-crack, where d’ya suppose?”
The Artist stares at me blankly. Then his face splits into a grin. “You trans dudes are always so tough. Okay, take off your shirt, and let’s see the damage.”
Billy stays with me, holding my hand. When I had the arm done, I was lying on my stomach with my face pressed into the leather headrest, but there’s nowhere for me to go this time. I’m on my back, staring up at the fluorescent lights, listening to the angry buzz of the needle as it scrapes across my chest. It feels like surgery without anesthetic. But the Artist has surprisingly refined taste in music and runs his pen back and forth to a Vivaldi concerto. “Do you know what it is?” he asks rhetorically.
“Storm at Sea,” I answer automatically.
“It’s…yeah. Yeah, it is. You like classical music?”
“Ouch,” I tell him.
“You okay?” Billy asks,
solicitous.
“Sure. But don’t expect any action tonight.”
He blushes a little and casts a glance at the Artist, who is bent close over my left nipple, filling in a wave. “You can lie on your back easy enough,” the Artist mutters. Billy suddenly becomes engrossed by the pictures on the wall. This goes on through six more concertos, until finally the Artist says, “I’m just shading a bit now,” and I look at myself in the mirror.
My skin is red and raw, swollen and sweating blood at the seams. But that hardly matters. The scene is exactly as I drew it, except a million times better. The colors are sharp and clear. The Marylee’s Revenge looks as though she’s exploding from my chest, bows pointed defiantly at the world, flag proudly flying over my heart. “God,” I whisper, “it’s beautiful.”
The Artist smiles. “Yeah, I liked that one. Bet it comes with a good story.”
You have no idea, I think to myself.
Chapter Eighteen
The drive home from Providence is long, made even longer with every bump and pothole sending a shot of pain across my torso. Billy looks contrite at the wheel. After he apologizes a fifth time I snap back, “Just shut up and put on a podcast.” We listen to Radiolab until the lights of the Mount Hope Bridge appear over the dashboard. He offers to take me back to his place, but I know Mariana’s gone home by now, and Grandma is all by herself.
Her house is never dark; she always leaves the hall light on to discourage burglars. But tonight, it’s switched off. Billy swings into the driveway and stares. The place looks gloomy and funereal. Inside, time has no meaning: in Maggie Hazard’s cockeyed world it could be high noon or 3 a.m., yesterday or 1967. Walking through the front door is like coming upon a play midscene.
“Want me to stay with you?”
I do, but I’m crabby and in pain and not good company. Mostly all I want is some ibuprofen and a scotch. “It’s okay, just drop me at the door.”
