“I’ll tell ya’.” Beside me, Bob shook his head. “Billy’s pretty lucky.” (Billy had run off the boat even before we’d come up. Everybody kept asking about him.) “Things like that happen all the time out there. If the Captain had felt the same way Red did, it would’ve just turned into an ‘accident.’ And nobody would never’ve said nothin’ about it again.”
“I can believe it.” Ron shook his head too.
And an hour later, Bob was hired to fill Red’s firstmate job. As soon as he and the Captain had a beer on it, he loped down to Elmer’s boat looking for me. “Come on. Maybe I get you a job as header on my boat with Captain Joe.”
So I went up with him. We sat around, the three of us, on overturned pails, talking. Bare-chested Captain Joe was a slow, affable, almost overly polite Texan (beside whom Bob, with his jokes and enthusiasms, looked like a parody of some city slicker). It was his father’s boat, he told us. In past years he’d been first mate but was running it this summer as captain, since his father didn’t want to work it any more. As we sat around talking and telling our stories (I’d given Bob a strict order not to tell anyone I was a writer. He’d followed it, but every once and a while, when there was an ordinary pause in the conversation, I could see him kind of balking), I got the impression Joe liked me. I certainly liked him. But finally he leaned forward and said, almost sheepishly: “’Bout you workin’ on the boat. As a header, I mean. That’s Billy’s job, see. Ain’t nothin’ I can do about that. He worked with my daddy. Now you can stay on the boat tonight, if you want. Billy’s an old alkie, and he’s out gettin’ drunk now, I know that. After what happened, I don’t blame him. He ain’t gonna be back tonight, I know that too. Well, I’m shovin’ out tomorrow mornin’, no matter what. ’Cause I wanna get fishin’ again. After all this mess with Red, I ain’t gonna feel good till I get back to work. But I’ll tell you, it’s fifty-fifty Billy’ll show up. Oh, he knows I’m goin’. I told him that. But if he don’t show before we leave, then you got the job. If he do come back, though—” Joe shrugged hairy shoulders and grinned, turning up his wide, hard fisherman’s hands. “Well, then, there ain’t nothin’ I can do. He goes out with me and you don’t. That all right with you?”
“Sure,” I said. “At least I got a chance.” I grinned at Bob, who grinned back—though I think he would have liked it all a little firmer.
“Like I say.” Joe shrugged again. “With Billy, it’s fifty-fifty.”
“Well,” Bob said. “I’ll work with anybody. But I kinda hope Billy has himself a real good time tonight!”
Bob had stayed on Elmer’s boat for three nights. Now I went back down to tell Ron that if I didn’t show up the next morning I had another job—if not, don’t mention it to Elmer (who wasn’t coming by the boat till three or four in the afternoon these days) and things would go on as they had been. That night I stayed on Captain Joe’s boat. The sleeping quarters for the header were a lot nicer than on Elmer’s. There was a real bunk, for one thing.
The mosquitoes came out just after sunset’s salmon drowned in indigo evening. We went inside the galley, to close the screen door behind us and turn on the dim ceiling bulb, Joe making the obligatory jokes about getting mosquito bites on your dick when you went to take a piss. (All the boats had inside johns, but it seemed to be a mark of pride—at least for pissing—not to use them. And, as Bob said to me, shaking himself off over the rail, when, once, I mentioned it to him: “It all ends up in the same place anyway.”) Later I came out on the night deck, made my way around the cabin up to the forepeak, went down the little ladder, swatting at mosquitoes, pulled the framed screening across the opening, and went to sleep, curious about morning.
According to the temperature lights on the front corner of the supermarket, daytime temperatures in Aransas Pass that summer were sometimes as high as a hundred and four. Nighttime temperatures seldom fell below seventy-five. But because, even on the ocean, it was a dry heat, it was more tolerable than New York’s steaming damp.
Near five I woke up in the warm slantlight, had to take a leak, got my jeans on, and went out to the seaside rail of the boat. The lifting sun was low, the sky was bright, and long shadows from the cabin darkened the rail. As I was finishing and zipping up, I glanced at the cabin window. Through the porthole I could see across to the bunk where, on his back, Captain Joe lay asleep. The sheet he’d slept under had slid off, hanging only over one foot. He slept naked, one hand on his hirsute gut. His other arm was jackknifed over his face. A morning erection angled above his belly, a crane of flesh rising, lowering, rising again with his breath—
Abruptly I found myself in that ambiguous state between the psychological and the physiological that is desire. I started to walk back to the forepeak, but lingered to look another minute, glancing, now and again, to see if anyone was looking at me; and stayed a minute more—till, inside, Joe tried to kick his foot free of the sheet, raised his knee, then let it slide slowly down again—still, I was sure, sleeping.
At the forepeak, I climbed down, slid into the bunk, and stretched out.
What I knew then was that even if I worked on this boat with Bob, there would be no sex, neither with Bob nor anyone else. Between custom, my own reticence, and the work schedule that had raised Red’s irritation to the homicidal and nearly killed Billy, it would be impossible. Chin on my forearm, I brooded on it.
What I know now, though, is that what gave my realization its grim coloring was the inarticulate knowledge it was grounded on: no matter what boundaries I had crossed, desire (along with fear of the rejection of desire) might still erupt anywhere, to create new silences, new divisions, between the speakable and the unspeakable, the articulate and the inarticulable.
I fell asleep again.
Around six-thirty, I heard someone walking on deck. I swung my feet out, keeping my head low so as not to hit it on the overhead beams, came up, and wandered along the narrow bit of deck beside the cabin.
In his filthy cap with his matted hair spiking around it, Billy squatted by the lazarette puttering with something that had a rope on it. He looked pretty chipper for someone out drinking all night—though there was a pint bottle in his back pocket. He glanced up to grin at me over the couple of long yellow teeth that hung from his upper gum. “Well, now, hey there—how are you? Good mornin’. Huh? Hello, it’s nice out, ain’t it?”
“Hi, Billy,” I said.
“Yeah, good mornin’. How you doin’? You sleep in my bed last night? That’s okay. You wanna see Cap’? I think he’s still asleep. But he’ll be up soon. Ain’t it real nice out today? Hello, how you doin’ now?”
At which point Captain Joe, barefoot and in his jeans, shouldered out the galley door to the deck. Bob came out behind him about three beats later.
“Well, good morning,” I said; and then to the Captain, “Okay.” I grinned at Bob. “So long. See you when you get back in.”
Joe nodded at me, sleepily. “So long.”
Bob sighed and shook his head. I climbed over the gunwale to the dock and started down. I didn’t think Bob was going to argue with Joe about me—not that early in the morning. But in case he was tempted to, I figured I’d get going.
I went back to Elmer’s boat, into the cabin, and lay down on the other bunk across from sleeping Ron—when Elmer wasn’t on the boat, he’d said it was okay if I slept topside—and stretched out.
58.1. Memories of my time on the boat?
I tossed a handful of cubed salt pork into the black skillet, to hiss on the tiny galley stove, before I put in the chopped peppers and onions and tomatoes and chicken, while the soiled white plastic radio on the back of the counter twanged and drawled its steel guitar accompaniments to the tales of loose women and hard-drinking men—making the evening meal that edged Ron out of, and me into, the cook’s job with Elmer.
There was the time, my second afternoon on the boat, when I thought the jar at the back of the galley table (beside the radio) was full of sweet gherkins, took one out, and u
nknowingly bit into my first whole jalapeno—keeping me, after the moments of fire and blindness, gasping in mute pain another quarter of an hour.
One afternoon, when we were still in dock, Mrs. Elmer, a tall woman with a blue scarf around her head, drove down in the pickup to bring Ron and me a very large crock bowl of potato salad and a whole apple pie. “We were havin’ a barbecue out at the house. I was gonna bring you boys some ribs and chicken, but they ate up all the meat. Anyway, I just thought you might like a little home-cooked food.”
We devoured both within a couple of hours, then had to put up with Elmer’s teasing all the next day because only the clean dishes (I washed them that night in the galley’s too-small aluminum sink) were left: “Dear God in heaven, that was enough potato salad for six men—and you two e’t it up all in one night? You guys are gonna have eyes breakin’ out on you, soon! What is it, they don’t feed you up north?”
I don’t remember the first moments when the boat pulled away from the dock to sea—though I can reconstruct what they must have been.
And at sea, the doors (on the poorer boats they were sometimes just that: a pair of old wooden doors, though on most they were plank constructions, pretty much the same size) lowered from their cranes, left and right, by the winch, growling and yowling at the side of the cabin, to strike the running waves, sheeting up spray, angling wide to drag apart the nets.
I remember endless discussions with Ron over whether the little net Elmer ran from the hand winch at the back to test how the shrimp were running was a “try-net” (with which you “tried” the waters) or a “tri-net” (as it had three sides). Elmer didn’t know either, though he read paperback Westerns voraciously.
Elmer’s most repeated line was, “I got four teeth and five kids.”
And there was the first time (while, at the winch, Elmer worked the cable drum and Ron, at the wheel, kept the boat steady), with the rail against my belly and the twenty-foot gaff pole with its basketball-hoop-sized hook dragging down my arms, I leaned out over the water to snag the ropes of the doors and pull them in—reached out for them, and missed, and missed again. And missed a third time.
At the drum, laughing, Elmer called: “Go on. Go on, you son of a bitch! Go on! You some poor excuse for a header! Try again. Go on an’ get ’em now!” At which point, on my next lunge, I got them. The net ropes jerked the gaff in my hands, yanking me against the rail hard enough to make me lose my breath—no, I didn’t drop the gaff pole. “Just as well too,” Elmer explained, when I was sitting on a basket, actually in the midst of my first heading—that part of the job, at least, was easy. Later, with our wide brooms, Ron and I swept the “trash” (seaweed, myriad fish, rocks, more fish, and everything else the sopping nets hauled onto the deck that wasn’t shrimp) out through the scupper holes and back into the sea. “’Cause if you had,” Elmer told me, laughing, for the fifth time, “I’d’ve thrown you right overboard and made you swim till you got it—and I’m damned if Id’a let you back on until you did.” I laughed too: and swept—and thought of Billy, of Red.
Brought up as a fairly polite guy, for the first day out I called Captain Elmer “Sir.” I figured that was what you called a boat captain. But after the first time Elmer, at the winch, lowered his nets and doors down into the water (and I called out, as I’d been instructed: “They’re in, sir”), he turned to me, rather angrily: “You gotta quit this ‘Sir’ shit, boy, even if you are from the north! You ain’t no nigger! So I don’t want you talking to me like a nigger. You a nigger, you can call me ‘Sir.’ But you a white man, you can call me by my name!”
“Yes, sir …” I began, surprised, scared, and at a loss for what to say. “I mean, yes. …”
Later, when Elmer was taking a nap and Ron and I leaned against the rail, looking at the runneled troughs closing and opening in the iron sea (a near green-black—under a sky as gray as a cat—that reflected almost nothing), Ron said to me, a little amazed, “I don’t think he realizes you’re Negro!”
I said: “I don’t think he does either!”
We both looked at each other, shrugged; then, hoping my father’s shade would not descend in wrath, I started calling Elmer “Elmer.”
And after four days out, when I stepped down, after Ron and Elmer, onto the dock, I felt as though the grayed boards moved more than the boat deck ever had. The world waved under me like water as I walked up the waterfront gravel and asphalt.
58.2. It seems from my first day in Aransas Pass, people were suggesting that I go see Tony. “He’s from up north, like you,” Jake explained. “He just bought himself a boat down here a couple of months ago—but he’s been working out of the docks along about two years. He’s another captain, now—his boat’s right up there. He lives with his wife just outside of Aransas. They got a little baby. But his wife’s from up north, too. You guys’ll like each other. Maybe he’ll give you a job, ’cause you’re both from the same place.” Well, I had a job, so it wasn’t a pressing priority. “Tony thinks everybody down here is just a dumb hick!” Jake grinned. “He may be right, too.”
I frowned. A diehard cultural relativist, I didn’t find that a high recommendation—and put meeting Tony a little lower down on my list of things to do.
But Ron knew Tony too. “Yeah, we should go over and say hello, so you can meet him. He’s an Italian guy—from New Jersey; not too far from where I come from. His wife Sandy is real nice.”
We walked up along the boats.
“Here we go,” Ron said, stopping at a boat a shade smaller than Elmer’s seventy-two-footer.
Wearing a pair of marine fatigue pants and no shirt, a muscular guy about thirty stood on deck, chiseling something from under the eaves of his cabin.
“Hey!” Ron called. “Tony, this is Chip. He’s headin’ with me down on Elmer’s boat.”
Tony looked over his shoulder. “Hi, there, Chip.”
“Hello,” I said.
Maybe it was just the accent that made him pause and come over to the rail. “You’re working down with Elmer? Glad to meet you.” He held out a hand.
I shook it. “Glad to meet you.”
“Chip came down here with a partner—a guy from Florida, Bob. He took over Red’s job, after all that nonsense.”
“Yeah. That was too bad about Red. Were you guys here for that?”
I nodded. “Red was a pretty nice fellow.”
“Red was fuckin’ crazy!” Tony said, with some vehemence. But I couldn’t tell if it had come after the fact, or was based on prior knowledge. Tony went on: “Why’d you come down here?”
“We were hitchhiking together,” I explained, “Bob and me. Bob had worked here before, a couple of years ago. So this is where we ended up.”
“Where did you start out from?”
“New York.” I felt rather like I was confessing.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “I been in New York. It’s a real lively place. Where’d you live?”
“The Lower East Side,” I told him.
“Oh.” He frowned a little. “Well, I wasn’t ever in that part. But I like New York. I like it down here, too.” Then he laughed. “I pretty much figured that you weren’t from around here. But you don’t sound like a New Yorker either.”
“A lot of people say that,” I told him. “But I am. You’ve been down here a couple of years, now. You must like it.”
“It’s okay.” He put his hands on the rail and cocked his head a little to the side. “How do you like it?”
“Well, I haven’t been down a full two weeks. But the people seem pretty friendly.”
“Oh, they’re friendly all right. They’re real nice. But they start to get to you, after a while. I mean, there’s not too much going on here.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s a little town.”
“But I mean,” Tony persisted, “there’s nothing to do. Nobody reads anything—not even a newspaper. Then, one day you realize half the guys working on this dock don’t even know how to read. Nobody can speak Englis
h—”
“Well, it’s a different accent,” I said. I wondered if I ought to mention the carton of Westerns shoved back under Elmer’s bunk. But I suspect that would have counted with Tony no more than the science fiction novels I was not mentioning I wrote myself.
“I mean decent English, like you learn in school. Just ordinary good grammar. I don’t hold myself any kind of intellectual, now. But I don’t say ‘ain’t’ and I don’t say ‘y’all.’ You talk to any ten guys on this dock, and you may not even find one who got out of high school. And a whole lot of them didn’t get out of the third grade. I only went to college for two years. I never graduated. But at least I got a high school diploma. Down here, them things are rare. Most people don’t even think that’s important.”
“You stayed in college longer than I did,” I told him.
“Okay, not everybody has to finish college. I didn’t. You didn’t. But, I mean, even with just a couple of sentences, I could tell you’d had some kind of education. And you’re a friend of Ron’s. Doesn’t just listening to some of the people talking down here kind of grab you in the craw? I mean, listening to them, thinking about what it means, well—sometimes it just makes me uncomfortable.”
“I suppose so.” I laughed. (Today I suspect his preoccupation was his new child’s coming education. But that morning it didn’t occur to me.) “Sometimes.” But, if anything, Tony’s judgments on all around us were probably the most uncomfortable-making things I’d heard yet.
Still—after Jake’s warning—as Tony went on, I realized a good deal of it was just a misguided attempt to put me—as an “educated northerner”—at my ease: a litany he felt obliged to go through more than a real opinion. “My wife likes it here,” he went on. “I think sometimes she misses being up home with her family and everything. But she likes it. And the boats haven’t been doing too bad by me.”
“How’s Sandy and the baby?” Ron asked. Knowing Tony better, perhaps he recognized the thrust of his complaint.
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 53
