Outerbridge Reach

by Robert Stone

  “It’s something to be proud of,” Browne said. “For what that’s worth.”

  The people in the room watched him, unsmiling.

  “You know,” Livingston said, “Mr. Hylan proposed to sail the prototype of this boat around the world alone.”

  “Why not?” Browne asked.

  When Browne had gone, Thorne, Livingston and Duffy walked along the riverbank. A gravel path led through an old apple orchard whose trees were beginning to bud. The rain held off.

  “I’ve never been down here before,” Harry said. “It’s restful.”

  “Matty’s touch,” Duffy said.

  “Matty’s touch,” Harry repeated. “So it keeps our minds off federal indictments and bad paper. Better we had a cement plaza in Fort Lee.”

  “Amen to that, boss.”

  “How about the young guy?” Thorne asked.

  “He’s not so young,” Duffy said. “He was in Vietnam.”

  Thorne nodded.

  “If we shitcan Altan Marine,” Harry said, “let’s find a place for him.”

  “Now you got your eye on this guy,” Livingston told him. “You’re always falling in love.”

  “That’s me,” Harry said. “It’s nearly spring. I’m romantic.”

  Browne was halfway back to his office when, on impulse, he turned south on the parkway and drove home to change his clothes. Anne was out, in town. Showering, he began to think about his days at sea, between Florida and Cape Fear. Fantasies of solitary voyages occurred to him. He had enjoyed his lone blue-water passage, although he had suffered from fatigue and some hallucinations.

  When he had changed he called the Altan repair yard on the north shore of Staten Island where he kept his own boat. The telephone was answered by one of the émigré Polish shipwrights the company had hired during the previous summer.

  “It’s Browne from Altan Sound View,” Browne told the man. “Can you get the Parsifal II in the water for me? I want to take her out.”

  The Pole, to the best of Browne’s understanding, assured him it would be done. Browne got in his car and headed south. It was nearly four when he pulled into the Altan yard in New Brighton. He parked against the chain-link fence and started walking toward the office. As he went, he saw one of the Poles securing a sheet metal grate over the shed. In the office he encountered a burly red-headed man whom he recognized as one of the company’s old hands.

  “I want to take my boat out,” he told the man. “I telephoned earlier.”

  “I don’t know about that,” the big man said. “We’re about to knock off.” He spoke with a Down East accent. Browne’s officerly sense sniffed contentiousness.

  “Look, all I want to do is rig the sails,” he explained. “Just let me get my sail bags out.”

  A second boatwright wandered over from the shed, a sallow man with a long face and a bony, prominent nose.

  “The season ain’t started yet, fella.”

  Together, Browne thought, the two of them embodied the spirit of No Can Do. It was everywhere lately, poisoning life and the country. He was not in the mood to be accommodating.

  “Look,” he told the yardbirds, “I telephoned early this afternoon. I asked you people to put my boat in the water. I was told it would be done.”

  “Like I told you,” the red-headed man said, “we’re closing.”

  Then he saw his catamaran through the open door of the office. She was set with her hulls resting on the rails of an elevator at the end of a dock, her mast and standing rigging in place.

  “Christ,” he said, “I’m looking at the goddam boat. I can get my own sail bags. How about a hand with the elevator?”

  The pair regarded him with sullen contempt. It occurred to him that he had raised his voice. Browne liked to think of himself as extremely, even excessively polite. But the world was no longer safe for good manners. He looked from one man to the other, angry to the point of violence.

  “Something wrong?” someone asked.

  Browne turned to see a man in the doorway. The man was stocky and hard-faced, with curly gray hair and a dark jaw. He was wearing a camel’s hair coat and tweed gillie’s hat. Browne had seen him before but failed to place him.

  “Maybe you can help me,” Browne said to the hard-faced man. In his excitement, Browne had adopted his father’s peremptory manner without being altogether aware of it.

  “Mr. Browne, isn’t it?” The man came forward and extended his hand. “I’m Pat Fay. We met in Newport Beach last year.”

  “Sure,” Browne said, still not remembering him. He gave an embarrassed laugh. “Say, I’m trying to get some help with my boat. But it seems to be closing time.”

  The big man regarded him in a smiling, not unfriendly manner.

  “Yeah?”

  “I wanted to take her out for an hour or so. Run down the checklist.”

  “You’d have to leave her in the water overnight then. Tied up to a mooring.”

  “Well, I’d lock her up,” Browne told him. He saw the man exchange looks with one of the yard workers behind him.

  After a moment Fay said, “O.K., you men go home. I’ll help him.”

  “If you’re gonna stay, Pat,” the Down Easter said, “we’ll stay too.”

  Fay took off his hat and his camel’s hair coat and set them down on a desk.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you,” Browne said. “I thought the boat would be in the water.” It seemed to him that there was something sinister in Fay’s manner.

  “No problem,” Fay said in a distantly cheery voice. He turned to the boatwrights. “This is Mr. Browne, fellas. One of our salesmen.” Browne did not correct him. Then Fay introduced the boatwrights, who were named Crawford and Fanelli. Browne nodded without looking at them. Fay’s air of patient virtue was getting on his nerves.

  “We know him,” Crawford said. “He keeps his boat here.”

  “Right,” Fanelli said.

  “See, Mr. Browne,” Fay said. “They know you.”

  He and Fay went down to the dock. Crawford and Fanelli sauntered along behind. The evening was charged with everyone’s stifled anger.

  When the catamaran was in the water, Crawford, the Maine man, let him into the shed to get his sails.

  “Guess you don’t know who Pat is,” Crawford said as Browne lifted the sails out of a locker. “Just the damn chief designer of this company.”

  At that point, Browne recalled meeting Fay in California. He was a former Navy mustang who had gone to work for Altan as an engineer.

  “Glad to have his help,” he said to Crawford. “Yours too.”

  The three men stood around as he cleared his outboard. They watched him pick up the motor and heave it into the brackets. The effort of hauling it himself left him breathless and sweaty. When he climbed into the boat, he saw that Fay had stripped to shirtsleeves and that there was a broad grease stain across the front of his white shirt and striped tie.

  “Better check your running lights,” Fay called to him. Fanelli untied the boat’s stern line, flinging it into the water with a disgusted motion.

  “Thanks again,” Browne called to them.

  After several pulls, he got the Evinrude to turn over. With his sails still bagged, he motored off into the twilight shadows of the Upper Bay. Waterborne at last, he had to laugh at the absurdity of his own situation. He had come out on the merest impulse. Then the yardmen’s resistance had provoked him into following through. Left to himself, it seemed, he might have changed his mind entirely. Now he was riding the swells off Staten Island with absolutely no purpose in mind.

  For a while he headed for the lights of Manhattan island, dodging around Robbens Reef with Katie’s Light to port. The city lights reminded him of the summer after his plebe year. His ship had steamed up the harbor and anchored in the Hudson. Out on the town, midshipmen had been less well received than they expected. He had fallen in love with Anne that summer.

  He heard the throbbing of a diesel and turned to see a lighter coming up
behind him at a good ten knots. The craft swung around him, passing to starboard. A bearded long-haired man in the wheelhouse looked down at him in astonishment. Browne was amused at the idea of how strange a spectacle he must present to passing craft. A butterfly in the gasworks, an ecological commando in a boat full of limpet mines. He waved to the lighter’s pilot. The man put his hand out the wheelhouse porthole and made the horned sign against the evil eye.

  In mid-harbor, he turned his back on the lights and Liberty’s statue. Hard by the Bayonne shore, he skirted a nun buoy and passed under the lighted fantail of an enormous container ship riding at anchor. Three Filipino crewmen leaned against the rail, smoking, looking silently down on him. On an impulse, he brought the helm around and steered for the Kill Van Kull.

  Ahead of him in the roadway, a Moran tug was steaming unencumbered toward Port Newark. Browne fell in line behind her. When the tug peeled off into Newark Bay, Browne increased his speed, heading down Arthur Kill. The channel lights drew him on. Passing Prall’s Island, he saw a night heron take flight and sail over the oil storage tanks on the Jersey side.

  The gathered night was starless and soiled by the glow of the harbor. Red and white refinery lights dappled the surface of the water. The wind carried the stench of the Fresh Kills dump. Browne laughed to himself. He ducked below and jammed a tape into the machine. The voice of Russ Columbo wafted into the sour-smelling darkness. “I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night” was the song. With his tape at full volume, he eased past the Island of Meadow. His lights caught a rat running along the oily bank of the Jersey shore. Then he saw another. He shivered in the wintry breeze that had come up with darkness.

  Ahead of him were the lights of the bridge that spanned the Kill. When he saw the black derelict shapes of a salvage yard on the Staten Island shore, he turned in and cut the motor.

  In a still backwater off the Kill, ringed with lights like a prison yard, wooden tugs and ferries were scattered like a child’s toy boats. Some lay half submerged and gutted, their stacks and steam engines moldering beside them in the shallows. Others were piled on each other four and five high, in dark masses that towered above the water. Browne knew the place. It was the property of his father-in-law, Jack Campbell. The wooden boats that rotted there, floodlit and girded round with electrified fence and razor wire, had been working harbor craft eighty and ninety years before.

  Browne’s father-in-law, a Yale man, was the presiding chief of a race of water ruffians—Irish and Newfie by origin—who had lorded it over certain sections of dockland since the last century. Rich from rum-running, bootlegging and two world wars, the Campbells owned odd lots of wharfage and real estate all over the harbor.

  Parsifal’s port float ran up the hull plates of a decaying tug, raising the shriek of fiberglass on metal. Under the awful sound, Russ Columbo’s seamless crooning sounded on. The tug lay so far over that Browne could step out onto her topsides. He threw a line around a bitt on the tug’s fo’c’sle and secured it. Then he walked along the rust-flaked hull to the wheelhouse and hunkered down to look around him. Somewhere ashore, a dog began to bark.

  On Browne’s left, the hulks lay scattered in a geometry of shadows. The busy sheer and curve of their shapes and the perfect stillness of the water made them appear held fast in some phantom disaster. Across the Kill, bulbous storage tanks, generators and floodlit power lines stretched to the end of darkness. The place was marked on the charts as Outerbridge Reach.

  In the week after their wedding, Anne had brought him to the place as a joke. “This is what comes with me,” she had said. “This is the family estate.”

  “Well,” he had said. “We need a picture.” So they had taken a picture of Anne’s brother Aidan in his racing coracle among the hulks. Sheltering from the wind against the pilothouse bulkhead, Browne remembered the afternoon as though it were the day before. He laughed at finding himself there again. The tape ended and the marshes of Outerbridge Reach received the soiled tide.

  He remembered scraps of the place’s history. Thousands of immigrants had died there, in shanties, of cholera, in winter far from home. It had been a place of loneliness, violence and terrible labor. It seemed to Browne that there was something about the channel he recognized but could not call to mind. On the dark shore, the junkyard hound kept barking as though it would go on forever.

  9

  WHEN a few weeks passed without any further word from Hylan, Strickland began to brood. He had no other project in reserve. He passed the time cutting his Central American documentary with Hersey.

  One day he and Hersey spent twelve straight hours splicing footage of foreign volunteers, internacionalistas who had gone south to assist the revolution. Among the internationalists Strickland had two particular favorites.

  His favorite male internationalist was a man from Oklahoma, a tall, sepulchral Methodist minister with a nasal drone and a wandering Adam’s apple. His favorite female was Charlotte, Biaggio’s freckled, buck-toothed German girlfriend, the one who had been an au pair in Saddle River. Charlotte had a wide, unvarying smile and bobbed her head from side to side as she spoke to the camera. To specify footage he and Hersey had given some internationalists nicknames. They called the earnest minister “Homer.” Hersey referred to Charlotte as “the Daughter of the Regiment,” abbreviated to “the DR.” She was so earnest and fatuous that the sight of her tempted Strickland to the obvious. He had to resist the impulse to intercut her merry palatal observations with corpses, parrots and amputees. Hersey imitated her relentlessly in Dutch-comedy German.

  “Uptight! Ich bin uptight! Sie ist uptight! Wir sind uptight!”

  “Saddle River is right,” Strickland told him. “That little broad went down on the whole Sandinista army. She went crazy for T-shirts. She has like five hundred T-shirts with slogans on them and each one represents a d . . different blow job.”

  “Don’t be uptight!” Hersey said. He clenched his teeth in a demented grin and batted his eyes and rolled his head from side to side. Finally, Strickland sent him home.

  Later he called Pamela, who arrived with a bag of take-out salad from the corner Korean. They discussed the Hylan project.

  “I swear,” Strickland said, “the whole thing’s fixed. I think it’s being staged for Hylan.”

  Pamela ate cole slaw with her fingers and laughed at him.

  “You’re so sordid, Strickland. How can you think that! I mean, those people are so pure!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Hey, I know all about boats,” Pamela insisted. “I used to sail.” The next day Strickland’s partner and business manager called him in. His partner was a woman named Freya Blume, whose offices were on the fourth floor of the Brill building, a five-minute walk from his studio.

  When he arrived at the office, Freya came out and kissed him. She was a tall handsome woman a few years older than he. Her gray hair was short and attractively styled.

  “Beautiful as ever,” Strickland told her.

  Freya put a hand to her heart.

  “Why, how flattering!” she said archly. Her voice had a trace of old Europe. “How nice.”

  He saw that she had put on some weight. She dressed very carefully. Freya and Strickland had been lovers many years before. Almost all the attractive women Strickland knew had been to bed with him.

  “Everything’s signed,” Freya told him. “Apparently Hylan’s in Finland working on his boat. Can you go over there?”

  “Christ,” Strickland said. “That was sudden.”

  Freya shrugged.

  “I thought they had forgotten about it,” Strickland said.

  “Yes? Well they haven’t. Been to Finland?”

  “Never.”

  “Lovely country. Forest and sky, lakes and sea.”

  “I have yet to set eyes on this guy, Freya. He won’t give me the time of day.”

  She put the contract down in front of him.

  “You have better than the time of day. You have his signature.”


  Strickland had a look at the last page. A signature had indeed been scrawled under the name of Matthew Hylan.

  “I haven’t even finished cutting the Nicaraguan stuff.”

  “You’re lazy,” Freya told him.

  “Think so?”

  “Yes. Very talented but very lazy.” She gave him a quick fond smile.

  “I have two questions,” Strickland said. “One is: what about budget? Two is: do they have to approve a final cut?”

  “We’ll have to submit an itemized budget. It won’t be a problem because I happen to know they’ll go to a million.”

  “What if they don’t like what they see?”

  “They’re not paying you a fee. So they have no control.”

  “Is this on paper?”

  “No. But that’s the way it works.”

  “V-very generous,” Strickland said. “Very easygoing. What if they’re not satisfied?”

  “You mean what if Hylan and his company come out looking like assholes?”

  “Yeah,” Strickland said. “Something like that.”

  Freya laughed. “But Hylan likes you. He liked Under the Life. He loved LZ Bravo.”

  LZ Bravo was a film Strickland had made during the Vietnam War. During the filming bad things had happened to him, and although it contained some of his best work he did not care to be reminded of it. He stood up and walked to the window and looked down at the mid-morning paseo on Broadway.

  “I really won’t know if this is possible until I meet the guy,” he told Freya. On the street below, the wayward individual to whom he had given his cordobas and lempiras was attempting to beg from a Greek hot dog vendor. The vendor showed his teeth. Two Sisters of Charity in knit sweaters and saris walked by. “I have to rely on Hylan himself to shoot the footage at sea.”

  “That should be good,” Freya said.

  “Yes,” Strickland said. “If he’s the man I take him for, it should be good.”

  They looked at each other and laughed.

  “I think you can count on him,” Freya said. “I’ve met him. He’s a young putz.”

  “So I hear,” Strickland said. “Pretentious and self-promoting. Which is how I like them.”