Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

  Pop told me that the one on the right, the blonde, became something of a celebrity in the region, posing for pictures for tourist brochures and magazine advertisements for beer. The one on the left became my mother.

  “Won the gold and married the silver,” Pop always said about the picture. I don’t look at it much anymore. I don’t have to. Sometimes I saw it when I closed my eyes at night. I knew that she wouldn’t be there when I opened my eyes again in the morning.

  There were times, riding alone on cloudy days on an empty stretch of road, that I would pretend to be my father, winning his remarkable debut victory at Ghent, following the sweep of the road, the finish line coming into view, and him a half mile ahead of the next closest man. The unknown rookie, the lonely, mistrusted German in the pack. Near the end the narrow Belgian road opened into a wide boulevard, where a crowd of thousands lined the police barricades. “They cheered as I got close,” Pop said, his eyes glowing with the remembered image, “and then”—a chuckle here and a lowering of his voice—“they went quiet. They saw me. But they didn’t know who I was.” I’d look over my shoulder to see no one coming up from behind, zip up my jersey, pantomime lifting my goggles onto my forehead. I’d blow a kiss with both hands and roll across an imaginary finish line with my arms raised high in the air.

  5

  PERILS OF CHESS CAMP

  We finished the day’s repairs early. The walk-in trade was slow. I thought if he’d let me, I’d go over to Grey’s and see what he was up to.

  “Pop?”

  “Go,” he said.

  The hangar was a Quonset hut with a U-shaped roof of corrugated steel. It was built by the Coast Guard during wartime. In the thirteen years we had lived next door, I had never really known who owned the building.

  “It belongs to the town,” Grey said, the day we pried open the sliding door, inlaid with an anchor of chipped red paint, and crawled in on our hands and knees. “Jack looked it up for me. It belonged to someone else for a while. He leased the berths but wasn’t making any money so he talked the town into buying to tear it down and turn into a parking lot. Nobody pays to keep their boat here anymore. What do you think?” he asked, as we stood in the dark, breathing in years of dust and neglect.

  “I think it’s a rusty pile of shit.”

  “Needs a little work,” he conceded, but then that’s what he’d said about Ray’s canoe.

  Crawling out, Grey tore his shirt. A circle of blood seeped through the white cloth. “You’re going to need a tetanus shot,” I said.

  “Forget it,” he said. “People would like me better if my jaw was locked up.”

  Within a week, a maintenance man from out at the airport came by and took off the old lock, installed a new one, and gave Grey the key. Then Grey took a claw hammer to the warped boards that covered the windows and opened the shutters. He tore out all the warped and decayed fixtures. And in the weeks since then the lights had been on even after we left the shop for the night. Outside, a pile of rotting wood had grown, and the Reeds’ white Ford pickup had scooted back and forth to the ferry, returning each time with a bed full of lumber and supplies. Then a flatbed truck had arrived from the mainland carrying sheets of drywall. The front door had been stripped and painted a nautical white, the anchor inlay a fire-engine red, and on a piece of scrap wood in Callie’s hand was written “Reed Shipworks.”

  I heard a radio inside tuned to the news and pushed the door open to an interior lit by hanging work lamps that were blinding in comparison to the gloom of our shop. The air smelled of fresh sawdust and chemical sealant, a big change from the first time Grey and I’d crawled through the busted slats. Then it smelled of rotted wood and something else, maybe piss or mold. Now it was all unfinished lumber and virgin sheetrock. The massive worktable that occupied much of the center of the building had been refinished. It was covered with the remnants of a picnic dinner, paper plates, wadded napkins.

  Agnes and Jack Reed were at opposite ends of the table. She was playing solitaire. Jack was sorting through a box of screws and hinges. Grey was perched at the cable spool laid sideways on which he set his plans. Only Callie, at the far end of the hangar on a ladder with a paintbrush, looked like she was doing any work.

  Agnes looked up when she heard the door slam. Her eyes were going. She held her glasses above the bridge of her nose, as though she was trying them on for the first time and studied the rows of overlapping cards in front of her.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Tom,” she said, in her way, which always sounded like a question. “There’s pie left.”

  There was a play on a black queen she was missing. I tapped the table to show it to her. She leaned closer and closer until she saw it. “No thanks,” I said.

  “What’s it like to be a high school grad?”

  “It’s funny you should say that,” I said, “because I was just thinking it didn’t feel any different.”

  “Well,” she said, “I guess that’s to be expected.”

  “I guess,” I said. I didn’t know what she meant.

  “Grey said the same thing, but then he doesn’t technically qualify.”

  “Hey,” Grey said, “I heard that.” He was wiping ink from a broken ballpoint onto his skin. In the summer Grey never wore a shirt. You couldn’t make him. He had on the red corduroy cutoffs that Agnes threw out at least once every summer since freshman year and, on a silver chain around his neck, an Ojibwa arrowhead, a relic of the Battle of Otter Island. Sometime since I’d last seen him he’d braided his hair into pigtails. Grey fixed his hair all kinds of ways when he was bored. If he had been anyone else he would’ve gotten the crap kicked out of him, because this was still northern Wisconsin, after all. But on St. Raphael, like in school, Grey Reed set the standard for fashion, hair and otherwise.

  Jack looked up from his hardware and squinted. He wore glasses too. So did Grey’s little brother. Everybody in the Reed household had wrecked their eyes on books, except Grey.

  Callie jumped off of the ladder. In her oversized work shirt and red bandanna she looked like one of those heroic women factory workers of World War II. “Well,” she said. She placed one hand on her hip, the other sweeping the room like she was a game show model, “what do you say?”

  When she asked me this, Grey, Jack, and Agnes looked up from what they were doing and waited. I didn’t expect my opinion to mean so much. Looking around at the clean-planed surfaces, the new wooden gangway leading up to the sail loft, and the varnished windowsills, I had to admit that they’d done something very good in no time at all. “It looks terrific,” I said. “It really does.”

  They all smiled and I felt happy for them and sad for myself at the same time, because I knew that this had nothing to do with me.

  “Where’s the Toad?” I asked, meaning his little brother Todd, who we called the Toad because of the similarity in the sounds and because he frankly looked like one.

  “Chess camp.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He told you he was going.”

  “I know he did,” I said. “I thought he was kidding.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “All they do is play chess all day?”

  “Yeah, he said there was a riot once when one of the counselors tried to get them to go outside for archery. And they had to stop sending them out in canoes because they’d take their little portable boards with them and kept crashing into each other because they were looking at the board instead of watching where they were going. You have to know that none of them can swim worth a crap.”

  “Boys,” Jack said. “Enough.” He was as mild-mannered as a superhero’s alter ego but he was no pushover. Jack had traveled the world in the Army and for the Associated Press. Now he edited the Star, the island weekly, and, Grey said, read seven other papers a day, just to keep up with the events of the world. In that regard he was as informed as anybody I knew.

  “We are happy when our children take an interest in anything,” Jack s
aid.

  “When you’re parents, you’ll understand,” Agnes said. This is the sort of thing she said a lot. I’m sure she believed she did the best for her boys and as much as that should’ve been its own reward, she wanted them to know it too.

  “Come here,” Grey said. “Check this out.” We all walked to the north end of the structure. Grey pushed a square red button and a new aluminum door slid upwards. The new door replaced a wooden one made of broken slats and smashed windows, at least one of which I’d busted myself.

  “Go ahead,” he said. I pushed the button and the door slid back down.

  “And look at this.” He pulled on a hanging rope and a retractable ladder slid down, on silent rollers.

  Grey made an “after-you” gesture with his hand and I climbed to the top of the ladder, poking my head through to an uninterrupted plane of sanded wood. “The sail loft,” Grey called from the bottom rung.

  All of this had come out of nowhere, like Grey had created it whole with a wave of his hand.

  When I climbed back down, Jack and Agnes were gone.

  Grey said, “I thought they’d never leave.”

  “Nice having them around, though,” Callie said. “They’re useful.”

  “They do what I tell them.”

  “And they gave you five thousand dollars,” Callie said.

  “They gave you five thousand dollars?” I said.

  “They didn’t give it. They loaned it. That’s the agreement,” Grey said.

  “How are you going to make money?”

  “I saw a notice down at the marina for this sloop some guy wants to sell. I figure there’s got to be a lot of boats like that, boats their owners can’t afford anymore or don’t take out as much as they thought they were going to when they bought them. All they need is a little push. We’ll be here to push them. They sell them to us, we fix them up, and sell them for twice what we paid.”

  “Don’t you think there’s someone at the marina who takes care of that?”

  “No,” Grey said. “I mean if a guy comes to them and says he wants to sell his boat, they probably ask around, but I bet that’s as far as it goes. The way I’m thinking is we do the asking. We look around the marina to see what boats stay in their slips all summer.”

  “It could work,” I said.

  Grey said, “It will work. I’ve got every angle covered. This is going to be the biggest thing to hit the island since steam navigation.”

  Callie laughed. “That’s what he told me, anyway. I told him I don’t care if he makes me rich as long as he doesn’t make me starve.”

  Her face and hair glittered with stray flecks from the electric paint sprayer. She looked tired from work, two days of worry and no sleep, since her dad went missing. Callie looked a hundred percent different from the first time we’d seen her, six years earlier, waiting by the docks, in her white knee socks and patent leather buckle shoes, a plaid jumper, white blouse, and pigtails.

  Grey and I were dawdling down to the ferry for the first day of seventh grade, going to school on the mainland after seven years at Cabot Elementary, and he’d shaded his eyes from the sun with his notebook and asked, “Who might that be?”

  “Terri Gustafson,” I said.

  “Nah, the one sitting down.”

  “Some Fib,” I said, FIB being an acronym which technically stood for Fucking Illinois Bastard but which we applied democratically to anyone who visited our shores. Up here you had us and then you had your Fibs and your Jibs, your tourists and your Indians, with your Jibs commanding somewhat higher esteem since they were at least from here. That was the feeling among us kids anyway. Among the grown-ups I guess it was the same only maybe more so, despite the fact that with the Fibs you had the tourist dollars and with the Jibs you had problems: the Spear-fishing Problem and the Bingo Problem and the Basically Acting Like They Owned the Place Problem.

  Terri Gustafson twirled the new girl’s binder on her fingertip. When Terri came close the girl would grab for the binder as Terri snatched it out of reach. Then, remembering herself, the girl would settle back on the bench, fold her arms, and blow air through her teeth in exasperation.

  Grey walked up behind Terri and caught her by the wrist. He twisted her arm behind her, pushing her elbow up her back as high as he could without hurting her and then, smiling, jerking it higher. Terri yelped like a dog, dropped the binder on the ground, and backed away clutching at her shoulder. She glared at Grey and then at the new girl, like she was trying to figure out what alliance this dark, kinky-haired stranger had formed with the most popular boy on the island before school had even started. Grey picked up the binder, brushed the dust off Bobby Sherman’s pretty-boy mug, and handed it back to the girl, who took it without thanking him.

  When the ferry came, the girl climbed the stairs and sat behind the pilot house. Terri trailed us at a safe distance, choosing to mope on the starboard side of the boat, while Grey and I staked out our usual spots on the rail to port.

  We were hanging over the side like always, spitting into the waves, when Grey said, “Go up there and ask her what her name is.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Because you want to know,” he said.

  I scaled the metal stairway and found the girl sitting on the wooden bench, not looking at the water or anything but the closed door to the bridge where Pete drove the boat.

  “Grey—that’s Grey down there—he wants to know your name,” I said.

  “Then why did you come?”

  “I guess I was closest.”

  “Callie,” she said.

  “Callie?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Thanks,” I said and slid down the handrail to the car deck.

  “Callie,” I told Grey.

  “Where’s she from?” he said.

  “How should I know?” I said.

  “Didn’t you ask?”

  “Nope.”

  “Tell him to ask me himself,” she said, once I had hauled myself up the stairs for a second time. I turned to go get him but then there he was standing behind me.

  “He wants to know—” I started to say, when Grey blurted, “So are you like black or what?”

  She made a face like the kind Pop made when he leaned on his bad hip.

  “I’m only asking because they’ll be asking,” Grey said. Something about that made her laugh. “Who?”

  “The kids.”

  “They’ll ask you?”

  “They will when they find out I know.”

  “How will they know you know?” she asked, trying to sound mad but not.

  “Somebody’s going to ask,” Grey said. “So—”

  “So what?”

  “What should I tell them?”

  “My father was born on the island of Jamaica,” she said, with the trace of an accent that proved that at least she was from somewhere else.

  And from that day on, where it had been Grey and me, it would be Grey and Callie and me. Grey granted her membership into our exclusive society before he ever knew that Callie was a name she had spoken just then for the first time, that it was a blending of Catherine Leila, the name given to her by her mother.

  Grey reached under the table and pulled out the battered White Owl cigar tin he kept his weed in, opened the tin, and flicked a paper off the pack of Zig Zags.

  “I should clean the brushes,” Callie said.

  Grey watched her go but didn’t say anything. She was trying to tell him there was work he could be doing and any argument he raised would only end with him having to admit she was right.

  “She talk to her dad?” I asked.

  “She said she won’t call him.”

  “Why does she think he didn’t show up?”

  “She doesn’t know what to think. Hell, maybe he just up and headed back to Jamaica?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Grey beamed and put his thumb and first finger together. “For the ganja, mon.”

  “She pretty mad?” />
  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  I thought about that. “No. But I see enough of Ernst.”

  “Heard that,” Grey said. “Can you make it to the docks by six tomorrow?”

  “Why?”

  “We’re going out to Cowards Island.”

  “Who?”

  “You are. Me, Cal?—You said you’d go.”

  “When?”

  “When we talked about it.”

  “I got to work. I didn’t much yesterday and I promised Pop.”

  Grey twisted the paper taut, licked the gummed edge and drew the whole joint through his moistened lips. He conjured a Bic lighter out of his pocket, fired the end, and handed it to me after holding the smoke in his lungs for close to a minute. “So blow him off,” he said.

  “You know what would happen if I did.”

  “What would happen? Look, sooner or later you’re going to have to stand up to him. Shit, you’re moving out in a couple of months. Just tell him, ‘Pop, Grey and Callie and I are going to be taking a little boat trip tomorrow. Now you can pound the holy hell out of me, but this is the way it’s going to be.’”

  “Like it’s that easy.”