Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

  I liked to hear Jack talk about the old days and he liked talking to me about them because I was the only person who cared.

  “Our fathers made this place what it is, such as it is. Not much to boast about but, it’s their legacy—and our history,” he said. And it was true. Ashley’s grandfather built this town on lumber money. Jack’s dad had run the paper before Jack did. Dolores’s father Millar Kraus came to this island in the Depression, a forestry agent for the government.

  I looked over to the bar and saw that Sgt. Spires had come in. He was in uniform so I figured he hadn’t come in for a drink. There was an unwritten rule that the Friendlys were free to serve minors as long as we were with a parent, and it didn’t have to be our own parent, so I didn’t worry about getting busted.

  “Of course,” Jack said, “none of that has anything to do with you in the end.”

  I watched Spires on his way to the door. “What do you mean in the end?”

  “When it comes time to reckon.”

  “You mean when I’m dead.”

  He smiled. “There’s a lot of reckoning you do before you die. You’re going to face a lot of choices, and you should know that each choice you make is the only one you were ever going to make. See?”

  “Nope.”

  “Grey thinks it’s the fault of his teacher that he’s not going to college.”

  “It is,” I said. That seemed clear enough.

  “And where did the man get this power?” Jack said, and from the way he looked, I could tell he wasn’t kidding around. “Would you describe Jacobs as a powerful man?”

  “No.”

  “In the worst view of things all Jacobs did was treat Grey less fairly than he treated his other students, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Has anything like that ever happened to you?”

  I laughed. “Daily.”

  “And what do you do about it?”

  “Cuss and keep going.”

  “Exactly,” Jack said. “Grey is the reason Grey is not going to college. If going to school was something he really wanted to do he’d stop at nothing to do it.” As I was listening to him I peeled the label off the bottle and laid it on the tabletop. “Look, you and Grey each made a choice. Whether it was a good choice or not doesn’t really matter. You may or may not be happy about that choice. Right now I’m betting, no—” he paused and waited for me to confirm his guess. I nodded my head. “Then you realize that by having made that choice you are limited to a certain set of choices the next time around and ultimately these choices that you make add up to the only life you were ever going to lead.”

  “By the way you make it sound, it doesn’t matter which way I go because all of those decisions are already decided.”

  “I’m saying only your first choice is determined. After that you have to be more careful. It’s up to you.”

  “Pop—”

  “He’s got nothing to do with this—except you’d do well to make your father understand why it’s important for you to leave.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? Me going off to school when Pop wants me to stay and Grey staying here when you’d just as soon he leave.”

  “Yes, it is funny.” He slid out of the booth. “Come on,” he said, “I can see that I’m—what’s it you say?—freaking you out.”

  The air had gotten warmer with the night. It smelled of rain as we stepped outside. “We’ll have to do this again before you leave,” Jack was saying, but I didn’t say anything back because I was half listening to him and half watching a passing car that looked in the glare of the streetlight off the black hood like it might be Sitwell’s Dodge. It disappeared into the dark before I could be sure.

  I went home, found the phone without turning on the light and dialed Ashley’s number in the dark. Her line rang about twenty times, and I was about to hang up when her mother answered.

  “Is Ashley there, please,” I said.

  “No,” Mrs. Sitwell said. She sounded confused at the question.

  “Will you tell her Tom called?”

  A couple seconds went by where I guess she must have been thinking about it. “No,” she said again and hung up.

  “Jack says hey,” I told Pop as I passed him where he sat on the couch on my way to the bedroom. He grunted.

  Next morning, he was sulking again and even went so far as to—swear to God—throw a wrench at my head when a customer brought a bike back that he said I had fixed wrong.

  “Jeez,” I shouted.

  He stared, the rage building inside of him forcing his lips to mouth words that he didn’t speak out loud. On my way out, I slammed the door for the effect of it and didn’t much care if I ever walked back through it again.

  Out on the porch, I stamped around and smoked a cigarette and tried to figure out what to do. Not coming up with anything permanent, I decided to go over to the hangar to see how the Reeds were getting on. I hoped they’d all be over there, but it was just Grey and his brother Todd and some man I didn’t know. He looked like he could have come up from the country club, Fib probably, rich maybe, but frayed enough around the edges to fit in. The white blazer, sweat along the hairline, he could’ve been an old thirty or a youngish forty. Grey saw me come in and turned the man away from me so all I saw was their backs. I figured this was some guy from the marina and thought I’d bug the Toad while they finished talking about whatever it was.

  The work on the hangar was done. There were walls and a false ceiling over the office where there had only been the corrugated metal arching from the ground uninterrupted overhead. The floors were clean, except for drifts of sawdust in the corners, and the walls had been painted white. The place smelled of planed wood and varnish, the smells of a new enterprise. Grey’s little brother was hunched over the long workbench that dominated the center of the space.

  “Hey, Tom, look,” Todd said, “our first boat.” Somehow he’d managed to come back from three weeks of chess camp paler than when he left. His hair was stringy with sweat. The boat he was talking about was a couple of feet long, constructed of painted-over milk cartons. “It runs on a solar cell, here,” he said and tilted it so I could get a look. Actually, it was kind of cool, but I didn’t say so. I don’t know why not. Habit, I guess.

  He flicked a toggle. The propeller purred and then died. The guy talking to Grey turned. “Take it outside,” Grey hollered. “Tom, take him down by the lake.”

  I would’ve told him to get lost if he was alone, but this was business so I shoved Todd outside.

  “The sun charges the batteries,” he said.

  “No kidding,” I said. The Toad thought everyone was dumber than him. It helped us feel better about picking on him.

  “I’m not going to the lake,” I said. “Charge it up here.”

  He set the boat on the sidewalk in the sun and we stood looking at it a couple of minutes.

  “When do you know it’s done?”

  “The longer it charges the longer it runs,” he said and waited like he expected me to mock him again. Then he said, “I’m taking it to the beach.”

  “Be my guest.”

  Seeing the man talking to Grey up close, I chose old-looking young, out of the age options. “You a friend of his?” he asked me.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sir?” he said, with a kind of laugh. “Sir’s the police.” He held out a hand for me to shake. “Natch,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Howard Natchell. Natch.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced what looked like a ticket stub. I looked at it and saw it was a business card.

  Nowadays the guy who changes your oil’s got a business card. Back then I had only seen them handed out by the salesmen from the wholesaling firms. They didn’t come by our shop much because we rarely bought enough of anything to make the trip worthwhile. When they did come by it was most of the time with bad news, a man in a brown sports jacket, leather sample case splayed at the sti
tching, delivering the words: Owing to a failure of the purchaser to manage payments, all future orders will be shipped COD. After that it got more personal: “Sorry Ernst, but that’s just the way it’s got to be.”

  His name was written in raised silver letters almost invisible against the light blue or gray of the card, in the center of the card in machine-faked handwriting,

  Howard J. “Natch” Natchell

  and in the lower right-hand corner in small block print letters, in parentheses, the single word:

  ( PHARMACEUTICALS )

  “Sail any?” he asked me.

  “Some.”

  “I’m looking for crew sometimes. Interested?” He nodded as though he knew the answer.

  “Aren’t you selling your boat?”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Figured that’s what you’re talking to Grey about.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m always looking to deal.” Then he cocked his thumb and shot me with his forefinger and moseyed on down Main in the direction of the harbor.

  “Going to buy a boat from him?” I asked Grey when he stepped out on the porch.

  “From Natch? I might,” he said. “He’s got a couple, that sloop at the marina and another over in Michigan. He’s a drug dealer.”

  “Really, you think?” I said.

  Grey thought he owned the monopoly on sarcasm on the island. “Didn’t I say go with Todd?”

  “You did, but I didn’t. He’s a big fella now.”

  “Natch is looking to unload the sloop.”

  “Yeah? How’s that going to work?”

  “He wants four grand. It’s worth twice that as is. I buy it, fix it up, and ask for ten.”

  “Man, it’s that easy?”

  “What’ve I been telling you? Except.”

  “What?”

  “I haven’t got four grand.”

  “What have you got?”

  “See there’s start-up costs.”

  “How much is that?”

  “What I’m into Jack for. He lent me the five thousand. Out of that I’ve spent about three to get the place in shape.”

  “Three hundred?”

  “Three thousand. What are you, an idiot?”

  “How should I know? Three thousand bucks is a lot of money.”

  “Sheetrock and tools and it adds up.”

  “So you’ve got two grand left?”

  “Around there.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He didn’t answer, instead he glanced down toward the beach standing on his toes to catch sight of Todd safe on the sand.

  I said, “Have you seen Ashley?”

  “Since when?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look,” he said, “all I’ve got to do is get that boat in this hangar. From there on out everything else takes care of itself. The money’s out there waiting.”

  9

  RAB AND THE SONS OF LIBERTY

  The morning before I was supposed to leave, I was struck with an inspiration. After almost two months of not talking, my father and I settled the question in a manner that suited us both: on the road. He was sitting at the breakfast table, ignoring me, and I said, “Pop, got an idea. I’ll race you for it. If you win, I stay,” I said. “If I win, I’m gone and that’s the last you have to say about it.”

  He blinked and studied his cup, like he was trying to foretell the outcome in the steam. He set the coffee down, looked toward the window, and—for the first time in eight weeks—talked. Or sort of talked, he said, “Uh.” And, just in case it wasn’t clear what he meant by that, he reached his right hand across the table for me to shake.

  We rode the first couple of miles slowly, as had always been our custom. It was a muggy late-August morning, the kind that makes the heat and the damp lawns and overgrown greenery seemed permanent. At first I felt glad to be out riding, the two of us together. I’d missed this those last weeks. I would miss this when I went away. The fact that we weren’t talking seemed stupid and pointless. Then I remembered that it’d been his idea and that nothing I’d tried could get him off it. “Nice out, huh,” I said. He sprinted away from me.

  I caught up easy enough and made him pay for his surliness, kicking up the tempo until my lungs burned. Now it was Pop fighting to keep up. I pushed harder until I had reached the top of the hill. The landmarks of our route passed faster than they ever had. We reached the far end of the island before Pop caught up and was riding next to me. I offered him a drink from my water bottle. He shook it off. We turned east and flew past the dump and the airport. In seconds the white cross on the church mailbox came into view.

  By the church some tourists, gray-haired and stooped, wandered the cemetery, clearing grass and dirt away from the inscriptions on the headstones. Old people are nuts for cemeteries. I looked that way as we went by, and Pop sprinted past with his head down. That maneuver guaranteed that I would trail him as we rode past the turned heads of our neighbors and out of town again.

  On our second time up the rise to the bluffs, his face was red. Over the next ten miles we changed leads a dozen times—one of us pushing ahead and the other ducking into the slipstream of his rear wheel to catch a breath. Neither of us let up until we reached the airport for the second time when my father sat up in the saddle and coasted. I slowed up, detecting a smile on his lips. He accelerated and slowed again, trying to dupe me into passing him, but what I knew I’d learned from him, and I didn’t fall for it.

  Two hundred yards from the church, he stood up on his pedals trying to open some distance. I caught him easily. Seventy-five and then fifty yards and I swung past. Forty yards to go, I heard him coming on up my left. I swerved across the yellow line to cut him off, but he kept coming and I kept moving left on a diagonal. Less than ten yards to the line and I felt his elbow against my hip, heard his raspy breathing and smelled the thirty years of cigarettes. I left less than a shoulder’s width of the road to get by and still he tried. In one motion I leaned into him and thrust out my arms to push my wheel across the line ahead of his.

  The next second, I heard an explosion of splintering wood and the sound of his bike hitting the pavement. Pop groaned as the impact knocked the air out of his lungs. I squeezed my brakes and the bike skidded sideways. Turning around I saw him crumpled next to the mailbox, which was broken in half, with only the back left on the post and the cross hanging upside down by a single nail. I thought I had killed him. Then he rolled over, and I saw the pain on his face. I got to him as he was trying to stand and told him not to move.

  There was a gash on his forehead and his shoulder was pushed toward his neck at a sickening angle.

  He spat blood and said, “Tie.”

  “What?”

  “Tie,” he said again. “You didn’t get past me.”

  Reverend Vogel was culling dead petals from the geraniums in the church window boxes when he heard the crash and came running. Pop was lying alive but very much in pain by the road on his left side and rocking one way and then the other in an effort to drive the hurt from his body. Reverend Vogel looked at him and then at me. “What happened?”

  “He hit that,” I said, pointing at the shattered replica of the church.

  He went back to the church to call the state police and Ben Friendly who was the only person we knew on the island licensed in the practice of emergency medicine. Pop kept trying to stand. I wouldn’t let him. At some point when I was watching down the road for the sheriff or the state patrol or at least the Friendly car, Pop got to his feet and wandered across the road. I got a start when I saw he’d moved then looked toward the church and saw him standing, his right shoulder monstrously raised higher than the left, like a bloody scarecrow in the thick grass of the cemetery.

  We got him into the church and laid him on a pew, Reverend Vogel taking off my father’s shoes and using them to prop his head. I looked at his white feet, his toes clenched like hoofs. Pop kept saying, “Okay. Okay,” over and over, his face
twisting in pain each time we tried to move him. Ben came with his medical tackle box, sat Pop up, and gave him a shot.

  “What’d you give him?” I asked.

  Ben said, “Shut up.”

  He said Pop had at least one broken bone and maybe a dislocated shoulder. He said we should go to the clinic in Ashton. Pop said, “No, no, no.”

  Ben settled on a cheap-looking blue sling and said if Pop was permanently crippled he better not try to sue over it—unless he was prepared to pay out the same amount for a beer next time he walked into his tavern.

  “Deal,” Pop said. He stood up to go and fell like a leaf, cracking his head on the way to the floor. Then it was just a matter of loading him into Ben’s car and getting him to the mainland before he came to.

  I sat on a hard bench in the hall of the Ashton clinic as the nurses came and went carrying one x-ray after another. When Pop found out where we had taken him he clammed up and refused to answer any of the doctor’s questions.

  When they let us take him home, Jack and Agnes came over and helped Pop, loopy from painkillers, to bed.

  “You packed?” Jack asked me.

  I’d forgotten. “I can’t go now,” I said.

  He held up a hand to shut me up. “Ernst’ll be fine. Any one of us could look after him as well as you could,” he said.

  Until I was back in my room, I didn’t give any thought to what I would take, or how I would fit it all into the blue Bellwether backpack, which was all I was going to be carrying. Greyhound one way to Madison was twenty-two dollars, not including seven dollars they would have charged to ship my bike, and then another three on top of that to insure it. So I decided to ride my bike down to college.

  On the back of a brochure from the university I scrawled a list of the essential items and checked them off as I piled them on the bed.