Rapping at the door—knock, knock.
“Who’s there?” said the boy.
His father spilled a puddle of light in from the hall, one hand on the knob, one on the jamb. “Everything all right?”
“Fine.”
“Awfully quiet up here.”
“Just tired.”
His father’s eyes flicked to the computer, that ceaseless gush and bubble.
“I’m worried, too,” he said.
He was not entirely off the mark. The boy was worried. But not about oil. For hours, he had been fretting over the options for his boat ride with Dana Pint. He considered Middle Bay Light, which was beautiful at sunset. Or they could anchor off of Gaillard Island, where the brown pelicans made their roost, thriving again after near extinction, first because of hunting—their feathers had once been a popular adornment for women’s hats—then because of DDT. Now, according to Jinx the Oregonian, the EPA estimated more than ten thousand nests on the island, not just pelicans but herons and skimmers, stilts and terns and rails snugged in among the bulrush. For a while, after his father shut the door and left him, the boy indulged a fantasy in which he pointed his boat due south and kept on motoring into the Gulf until they ran out of gas. He imagined long days waiting for rescue with Dana Pint, nights desperate with stars, the ways they might use their bodies to soothe each other’s fear.
He settled, finally, on Fort Morgan Beach. He would pick her up at the marina, skim across the bay in gilded light, trim the outboard and run his boat right up on the sand.
That time of day, there occurred a subtle shifting in the heat, barely noticeable but no less real, like someone had cracked a window on the world, let some fresh air in. Shadows longer on the nameless creek. Dog River still and lovely as a watercolor of itself. Near the mouth of the river was a restaurant that made the best fried crab claws the boy had ever tasted, better than the marina’s—even the boy’s father would admit that this was true—and the boy could smell batter on the kitchen exhaust as he cruised under the bridge. A sailboat passed in the opposite direction, close hauled, luffing, three kids in life jackets on the bow. They waved, the boy waved back. He gave the outboard a little gas, his wake a frothy question mark as he curled between the channel markers and back toward his father’s marina on the western shore.
Dana Pint was waiting on the dock. He could see her sitting there, silhouetted by the sun. Her bare feet dangled toward the water. He dropped into idle so as not to disturb the few boats in rental slips, mine among them. What he saw next was an optical illusion caused by the angle of the light in his eyes—another head and then another sprouting from hers, torsos, arms, the impression weird, mythological. After a moment, he realized that two people were approaching from behind her. Lugging some burden between them, an ice chest. And there came a third body, shorter and rounder than Dana Pint. When he was close enough that the sun was behind the snack bar, he could see more clearly—Dana Pint on the dock and with her, two boys and a girl, all four watching his approach.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
“You’re not late.” Dana Pint met his eyes, looked away. “Pat just now pulled up.”
Pat was rangy, buzz-cut. Not as big as the boy but big enough. He took the ice chest from his companion and swung one end around for the boy, who accepted it without a word and lowered it into the stern. Pat scowled, flexed his fingers, smoothed his palms over his Jams.
“Heavy,” he said.
He hopped into the boat, making it list and wobble, turned and lifted Dana Pint aboard by her waist. She was wearing cutoff jeans and a white T-shirt, her bikini visible through the fabric, the cut and color of it—stringy, black.
“This is Doug,” she said. The second boy was helping the second girl into the boat. The girl was too short to make the long step and as she was reaching down with her lead leg, a sandal slipped into the water. The boy reached in quick and grabbed it before it sank. “And this is Kim.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said the boy.
He shook water from her sandal, handed it over. Instead of putting it back on, she took the other sandal off, tucked both into a straw beach bag. Dark hair, broad cheeks. Almost plump. The roommate.
“Thanks for letting us tag along,” she said.
How tiny he must have felt inside his bulk. For a few seconds, Dana Pint kept her eyes on her feet, curled and uncurled her toes. Then she pulled the T-shirt over her head and stared at the boy, shoulders straight, collarbones brittle-looking, her bikini faded and loose over her breasts.
“Let’s go,” she said.
And so the boy, this decent boy, this harmless boy, shoved off from the dock and set out across the bay, following the route he’d planned for Dana Pint, the boat trailed by hungry, noisy gulls.
Pat rooted in the ice chest, passed around cans of beer.
Kim said, “Is it true that seagulls explode if they eat Alka-Seltzer?”
“It’s true,” Doug said. “I’ve seen it.”
“Bullshit,” Pat said.
Dana Pint sat cross-legged in the bow, the sight of her so close to what the boy had imagined.
“They don’t explode.” His voice sounded faraway and muffled as if hearing himself through water. “Not the way people think. But the gas bubbles can rupture this thing called a crop. In their throat. It’s like a pouch where they store food.”
They were all looking at him. He couldn’t remember what he’d just said.
Pat laughed and crushed his beer can. “Anybody got an Alka-Seltzer?”
Fort Morgan was situated on a peninsula between the Gulf of Mexico and Mobile Bay. Less than two miles west, on Dauphin Island, stood Fort Gaines. With all those cannons guarding its entrance, the Port of Mobile was believed to be impregnable during the Civil War. And it’s true that for years blockade runners hustled in and out under protective fire. Mobile didn’t fall until Admiral Farragut got so tired of waiting he abandoned good sense—Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! I’ve studied the historical markers and roamed the musty passageways. An old boardwalk linked fort to beach over acres of bentgrass. You weren’t supposed to bring boats up on the shore but the boy did it all the time with his friends. The park service never came around. The fort closed to tourists at five o’clock, warm sand pocked with footprints soon to be erased by tide.
Only once, while Pat and Doug were tossing a Frisbee and Kim was toeing the shallows for sand dollars, did the boy find himself alone with Dana Pint. “Knock, knock,” she said from her towel, knee raised, right arm flung over her eyes. The boy’s senses were dulled by beer and sun, shame and anger, and he failed to answer straightaway.
“Don’t be such a baby,” she said. “You know I’m with Pat.”
Still the boy did not speak.
“I didn’t know he was bringing Doug.” She propped up on her elbow, her tone more defensive than remorseful. “I thought maybe you and Kim—”
“Who’s there?” he said.
Dana Pint sighed, stood, brushed sand from the backs of her thighs.
“There’s something wrong with you.”
“There’s something wrong with you who?”
He watched her stalk off down the beach, snapping her bikini bottom into place, watched her lead Pat into the dunes and out of sight. He wanted to leave them stranded on the beach. He should have left them. I would have left them. But he was not that kind of boy. Across the bay, paper mills and chemical plants exhaled fingers of blue smoke, beautiful from that distance, like machines for making clouds.
What the boy could not have known was that even as he sprawled there on the beach and even as his party skimmed back over the water and even as he steered the lonely course toward home, oil was stealing into Mobile Bay.
He did not patrol on Sundays. In the morning, he came down to the kitchen in his boxer shorts, fixed a bowl of Raisin Bran without m
ilk—he’d refused milk on his cereal since he was a child—poured a cup of coffee and plopped into a chair at the breakfast table. His mother witnessed all this while talking to his sister on the phone. The boy reached for the paper, which his father had left wedged into a napkin rack. He quartered it, a gesture so exactly like his father that it made his mother smile, and settled his gaze on a section of front page. His face went pale under his freckles. On the phone, his sister, Nan, thirteen, was expounding on the reasons she should be allowed to spend another night with a girl named Esther Agee. The boy shut his eyes a moment, then returned the paper to its place in the napkin rack and left his mother in the kitchen, his cereal and his coffee still untouched, his footsteps heavy on the stairs.
“Hold on a second, Nan,” his mother said. She hadn’t yet looked at the paper but she did so now, scanning headlines on the front page until she identified the article that had disturbed her son. “Let me call you back,” she said.
On the way upstairs, his mother would have mulled potential words of comfort. Something about the resiliency of nature. About how the accidents of men are insignificant by comparison. Such a sensitive boy, her son. But when she pushed open his door, expecting to find him moping in the bed, he was at his desk with the chair turned backward working on a model plane.
“It’s not the end of the world,” she said, which wasn’t at all what she’d intended. His nonchalance derailed her. She sat on the bed, tried again. “By next summer, it’ll be like none of this ever happened. You’ll see.”
He was finally attaching the engine cowling on his P-61 Black Widow. The flight deck and the waterslide still needed paint.
“I’m not worried,” he said, and it was true. After Dana Pint’s predictable betrayal. After the inevitable headline in the paper. After believing in goodness for no good reason his whole life. In the same way that black is the presence of all colors and nothing, the boy felt so smudged over, he no longer felt a thing.
An estuary acts as a natural filter. Pollutants are washed downstream on currents or inland on the tide and absorbed by marsh plants, canebrake and cattails sopping up impurities through their roots, leaving the water cleansed. On the surface, eventually, the world returns to normal. Only time reveals how it has been changed. So it was with Henry Bragg.
On Monday, he did not report for duty with the EPA. Or on Tuesday. Or on Wednesday. Volunteers came and went so often that Jinx the Oregonian hardly registered his absence. The boy overslept and ate his breakfast and perused the paper, avoiding news of the spill, the failure to cap the well, the potential damage to the bay, the cleanup effort, then retired to his room, the empty days looming before him. I recall that sensation so clearly from my own boyhood. You suppose all those hours will feel like freedom but they don’t. Too many to fill. No satisfaction in them. He moved around the house in a mysterious and awkward way, as if he had to think about everything before he did it. I do not mean to give the impression that the boy was nursing his broken heart or grieving for the water. He was sensitive, yes, perhaps too much so, but he was not a melodramatic sort. This was something else. He read the first few chapters of a spy novel but abandoned it on his nightstand, where it collected rings from lemonade glasses. He accepted calls from the girls he had pulled behind his boat but made no plans. He finished his P-61 Black Widow but did not hang it with the rest. It sat on his desk, the paint long dry. On Thursday, while the boy was in the basement lifting weights, his mother poked her head into his room looking for laundry and noticed that the model had been moved. She glanced up to locate the P-61 among the rest but the planes were gone, the ceiling returned to its original state except for a galaxy of eye hooks in the Sheetrock. His father found them later when he was hauling out the trash, all those delicate replicas crammed into a black lawn bag too full to fit right in the bin.
The boy heard his parents talking after supper, a low rumble of voices that meant a decision was being made. His father called him out onto the porch.
“You’re not volunteering anymore?” he said.
The boy just shrugged. His mother was eavesdropping in the kitchen.
“Why don’t you come back to work for me? I could use your help. I had to let the last of the marina girls go this afternoon.”
A spark flared in the boy’s chest, fizzled before it caught.
“Dana.”
“Is that her name?” his father said.
It rained that night, a hard summer rain, swelling the creek and tearing leaves from the trees, but the storm had passed by morning. His father offered him a ride to work but the boy said no thanks, he’d rather take the boat. Liter bottles and wedges of Styrofoam bobbed gently in his wake, washed by the rain from culverts in town into the watershed, his wake at idle speed little more than white bubbles and swirls that petered out before they reached the shore. The soft burble of the outboard hardened into a buzz as he accelerated into the river, blue swimming pools glittering on every other lawn, those lawns a perfect chemical green. Sometimes, on Fridays, I’d let myself grouse about how the river had been spoiled by becoming fashionable, and though he was too young to remember how it had been, and though he felt vaguely indicted, the boy was always patient with me. This was his river, no matter what an old man said. It looked altered on that morning. He saw no sign of oil, though the creeping possibility of oil was surely part of what he perceived. And it wasn’t the big houses or the pools. He hardly noticed those anymore. No one can say exactly what was in the boy’s mind as he motored upriver toward his father’s marina. But I can guess. He was thinking that everything had been ruined before he was ever born.
Except for the heat, it was like winter. Yachts hovered in slips under the seared tin roof but their owners did not come to run them out. The staff had been downsized. Now there was only Willis in the snack bar and Glen in the boatyard. Willis was old and black and Glen was old and white. They didn’t like each other. All day they smoked cigarettes in the shade on opposite ends of the marina, the boy moving between them, scraping and painting for Glen when an occasional boat came in needing work, waiting and bussing for Willis when an occasional customer needed food. I knew better than to pester him with questions. Most of the time, he loafed in a chair on the covered deck outside his father’s office, thumbing paperbacks and magazines deserted by previous customers. The marina’s lending library. Leave one, take one. The boy’s father holed up inside, tapping on a calculator and listening to talk radio, window unit leaking condensation down the wall.
The boy was floating on the edge of sleep, a magazine splayed in his lap, when he heard footsteps on the planks. He opened his eyes and there, like she had stepped out of the dream he was about to begin, was Dana Pint.
“I just came for my last check,” she said.
The boy blinked and wiped a hand over his face.
“Where’s Pat?”
“At work. I borrowed his car.”
He lifted the magazine, let it drop onto his thighs.
“I’m helping out around here.”
“You got a joke for me?”
“Knock, knock,” he said.
“Who’s there?”
“Boo.”
“I know this one. I go boo who and you ask me why I’m crying.”
“That’s it,” he said.
“Not much of a joke.”
“I guess not.”
“Well,” she said, and then she rapped on his father’s door and stepped inside, cold air puffing out before she shut the door behind her. A minute later, she emerged with an envelope in her back pocket.
“Have a good summer,” she said to the boy and he gave her his most indifferent, his least wounded smile.
That should have been the last time the boy saw Dana Pint, but as she turned to walk away, he pushed to his feet, magazine spilling on the floor.
“Wait,” he said.
She stopped and let her chi
n fall, one hand going to the check in her back pocket like she was worried he might make her give it back.
The boy did not take her out into the bay. Instead, he headed inland, away from the oil, under the bridge and past the houses with their pools. He would cook up a lie to tell his father. Or maybe he’d just tell the truth, suffer the consequences. He didn’t care. The mouth of the nameless creek was fringed with sawgrass. Butterflies. Turtles slipping from their logs. The nameless creek was really a dozen creeks, brown rivulets running between islands of swamp. A labyrinth of water. The boy knew the way by heart. He did not take her to his house. He didn’t even bother to point it out. He veered deeper into the swamp, the going slower now, cypress branches arching over the creek, painting a filigree of shadow.
Finally, the boy cut the engine, let them drift.
“I hung that rope swing,” he said, pointing at the trees. “With my dad. I was ten years old.”
The rope dangled from a high and sturdy branch. Three fat knots near the bottom for gaining purchase with your feet.
“Before this boat”—he patted the gunwale—“I used to have a canoe. I’d paddle back here every day in the summer.”
Dana Pint swatted a mosquito on her knee.
“Weren’t you scared?” she said.
“Of what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Alligators. Snakes.”
The boy shook his head.
“They’re more afraid of us than we are them.”
“Come here,” said Dana Pint, and she peeled her T-shirt over her head. He’d expected a bikini top or a bra but there was nothing. Her breasts were small, her nipples the same color as her lips. He kissed her, shoved his hand into her cutoffs. “Hang on,” she said, flicking the button with her thumb. She lifted her hips. The boy tugged her shorts over her calves, over her heels. They kissed again. Her mouth savored of ash. He husked his trunks down to his ankles. There was nothing lovely in what they did. She winced and tipped her chin, the tendons straining in her neck.
Eveningland Page 2