by Morris, Ian;
“How much?”
“How much you got?” he said.
I thought he was joking. “What does it cost to have a baby?” I asked and scratched. The question caught the attention of two girls sitting in the next booth and they stared.
Grey looked annoyed, missed his next shot, and watched me miss one as well before he said, “Not what I’m worried about.” He tried to pocket the thirteen but succeeded only in kicking it out of the corner. I dropped the two and followed up with the eight on an easy shot and felt satisfied to have won, but Grey wasn’t paying attention. He laid the cue on the table and dangled his beer between two fingers as we walked to our table. We sat. He leaned in close. “I’m working a deal,” he said. “I talked to this guy at the marina.”
“Local?”
“You don’t know him.”
“They own a cabin?”
“I said you don’t know him. He’s got a ketch—”
“He’s got a catch?”
“A ketch, a twenty-two-foot ketch. Thirty years old, sixteen of those in dry dock, prime condition, he says.”
“What does he want from you?”
“It’s up in Canada. He wants five thousand dollars. It’s worth ten times that. He says he’ll give it to me for two grand if I sail it out.”
“From where?”
“Up there.”
“Where up there?”
“I don’t know. The other side of the lake.”
“What’s over there?”
“I’m not sure we need to know,” he said.
“He’s got this boat worth fifty thousand dollars and he’s going to give it to you for two.”
Grey wiped the foam off his lips with his sleeve. “That’s about it.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. Taxes or something. You want another?” he asked, then lifted my bottle and saw that it was full. “It doesn’t sound right,” I said.
He shrugged. If he was hiding something from me it wouldn’t be the first time. He wasn’t above a lie.
“How much can you kick in?”
Grey shook his head.
“I have it,” I said. “It’s about all I have.”
He looked up from his beer. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’ll get it all back.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it’s an investment. Look,” he said. He set his beer bottle down on the far corner of the table, then with his left hand pushed the tin ashtray toward it. “They pay me to fly up to Sault Ste. Marie. I take a bus to Michipicoten, which is where the boat is. Hand over the dough, sign a piece of paper, and it’s all mine—ours. Then it’s a beam reach south by southwest home.” The bottle left a wet trail on the Formica as he slid it back toward him and lifted it to his mouth. “It’s a simple transaction. I bring the boat back. Fix it up. It shouldn’t need much, from what he says, and whatever materials it does need I can cover on credit. I sit back and take bids.
“When it’s all over you get the front money back and, say, twenty percent.”
The more he talked the worse the deal sounded. “When would you go?”
“Soon as the thaw. End of March, I’m hoping. Might have to wait until April.”
“I’ll go with,” I said.
“I’m not asking.”
“I know,” I said, “but I’ll go.”
“You don’t get it,” he said, “I’m not asking you.”
When we got back to the room, Ship was on the phone, saying, “Yes, Mom, no, Mom, I don’t, Mom. Mom—I don’t.” Grey flopped down next to him on his bed and Ship moved to the desk.
“When can you get it?” Grey asked.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“Cash.”
“I’ll get cash.”
Ship hung up the phone. “What cash?”
Grey looked at me as if asking whether he should tell Ship the story. I shook my head. “Tom’s been cheating on his tests,” he said. “I told him I wouldn’t say anything about it if he paid me off.”
Ship looked like he was trying to decide if Grey was telling the truth. “Well,” he said, pleased with the thought that just crossed his mind, “then I guess you won’t be getting any money, then, because you told me.”
“You know,” Grey said, “you’re right. I shouldn’t get any money now that I told somebody.”
On Saturday morning, we went down to the bank. You wouldn’t have thought it was much of a thing for a student to withdraw his savings at the end of term, but the way Grey stood next to me—shoulder to the counter, casing the lobby—made the teller nervous, which got me feeling like I had something to hide. She held my driver’s license for a long time, looking at the picture, at me, and at the picture again before she handed over the money, twenty-one hundred-dollar bills and change. I shoved the money into the inside pocket of my coat and held my arm tight against it so that I looked like I was packing heat or something. The white-haired bank cop watched us as we walked out.
It was one of those clear winter days that come with cold temperatures. Shivering, Grey held out his hand.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
He said, “Give it to me.”
“That’s okay.”
The sun was in his eyes and he squinted the same way he did when he was looking to start a fight. “I said give it.”
“I know and I said that’s okay.” People passing on the sidewalk were staring. I walked. Grey caught up and grabbed me by the arm. It’s mine, I wanted to say, but he wouldn’t have liked the sound of that. “What difference does it make who holds it?” is what I did say.
As he stared at the ground, I could see on his skull the inch-long white line where the hair didn’t grow back, a scar from where I split his head open with a can of Lincoln Logs when we were eight. “Look,” he said. “I don’t think you’re getting it. The people I’m talking about. They don’t know you. They never asked me to bring anybody else in. Get it. I’m not asking you to come with. I don’t want you to. Come on,” he jabbed his knuckles into my belly and made a flicking motion with his fingers. “Hand it over.”
I already knew I was going to give him the money, but I said, “What’s the hurry if you can’t go until April?”
He dropped his hand. “I left out a step.”
“I figured that out.”
He laughed sarcastically. “Yeah, well I hope so.”
He smiled in a way I’d seen dozens of times but never aimed at me. There was hate in it. It said, You can’t get where I am from where you are. “Fuck you,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Fuck me,” and slapped the envelope into his hand.
Grey ended up staying through exam week, which I didn’t mind because Ship did. To get even for him conning me out of every cent I had (I already knew I would never see that money again), I told him I had to study. Every morning I sat at my desk, staring at an open book, until he threw on his coat and left the room. Most of the time I was too distracted to wonder where he went. My exam results weren’t good, but nothing that happened could be blamed on Grey. I studied hard but exams were a lot like a field sprint in a bike race: you could go from first to last in a hurry. I blew my Trig final, a rookie error. The test was cumulative, which Professor Jeer might have told us and I forgot, or he told us and I didn’t think to worry about it, reasoning that if I could do the problems from the end of the semester I could do the ones from the beginning. That turned out not to be true. By the time I finished the exam the room was empty, outside of me and the proctor, and I wasn’t optimistic about how I had done.
On Tuesday, I had my German final, which consisted of a short-answer test and an oral presentation titled “Auf den Strand.” That should have been easy, except that Fräulein Menendez didn’t care so much about how well you could talk in German as she did about if you used all the vocabulary words assigned. Since I hadn’t bothered to remember which ones they were, it was pretty much dumb chance which ones showed up in my talk. I got nervous and substit
uted some of Pop’s Frisian words—wetter for wasser and seil for segel, thinking, as I did, that it was a crazy world where someone like me who could speak the language like he had been born in Germany, wouldn’t score as well as the captain of the girls swim team. This bothered me so much that I spent the rest of the afternoon feeling sorry for myself and forgot to hand in my final essay for English composition.
I still had my term paper for Dooley to write. I called my essay “The Betrayal of Tecumseh” because the word betrayal had been bouncing around in my head and I liked the sound of it. The problem is that I came up with the title before I did any of the research. Then I read three books on Tecumseh and couldn’t find where he was betrayed by anybody. You could say that the tribes of the south and west betrayed him by not joining his confederacy, but they had never said they would in the first place. You could say that he was betrayed by William Henry Harrison, but to me betrayed means that someone you trust turns on you, and I doubt that Tecumseh ever trusted the general. You could say the betrayal was of the Indians by the white men, but, I thought, who doesn’t know that? The betrayal of Tecumseh, then, had to be the fact that weak men can overcome stronger men if their only desire is to destroy those who are better than them. This came to me in my last paragraph. I didn’t start over.
I typed the last of the bibliography at six in the morning while Ship wheezed underneath his blankets. I hadn’t seen Grey since the previous afternoon. Blowing the last of the Wite-Out dry on the page, I threw my coat on over my pajamas, and headed down to Dooley’s office to slide the paper under the door. On the way over to the Humanities building, the wind ripped through the fabric of my clothes and I shivered, but on the way back the sun was rising, casting a glare on the dome of the observatory.
A thought popped into my head, so odd that I said it out loud. “I go to college.”
The words meant something to me. For four months I’d been lonely, scared at times, and angry, but I’d also been happy. I couldn’t build a boat, but I’d learned a thing or two.
17
IN THIS SCENE
When I got back to the room, Grey was asleep face down on my bed with his Army coat still on and Ship was sitting at his desk watching him. “He just came in here and did that,” Ship said.
“Did what?”
“That—he just walked in and fell over like that.”
“Did he say anything?”
“He said, ‘Bed.’—Where were you?”
“Turning in a term paper.”
“How long’s he going to stay?”
“I don’t know, Ship, and I really can’t talk about it. I’m wiped out.”
“You can’t sleep here.”
“I wasn’t asking.”
“I said ‘no.’”
“Listen, Ship, I’ll sleep on the floor. You’ll never know the difference.” I yanked my pillow out from under Grey’s head and lay on the floor. The pillow was wet from where he drooled on it, so I turned it over and was out before I knew it.
When I woke up, Grey was sitting at Ship’s desk, smoking a cigarette and paging through one of Ship’s business textbooks.
“Do you think this stuff would do me any good?”
“Sure, why not?”
“What do you have left to do?”
“That was it.”
“So you’re ready to celebrate?”
“Actually, I’ve got this thing I’m supposed to go to,” I said and knew instantly I’d made a mistake.
“Great, where?”
“They just said me.”
“That’s only because they haven’t met me yet.”
Grey wore what he’d worn all week, and I dug out the yellow shirt I got from Howie who was going to throw it away. It was a perfectly good shirt, yellow chamois cloth, with steel buttons and red stitching on the pockets and cuffs, the only thing wrong with it being that Howie didn’t want it anymore. Grey talced his head and the stubble on his face with Ship’s baby powder and brushed his teeth with Ship’s Crest.
I looked to see if my collar was twisted and saw that the months without sun had turned my hair the color of wet hay. “Look,” I told him, “I don’t know these people yet. Don’t mess it up for me.”
“Just going for the show,” Grey said. “You look like a rodeo clown.”
We walked east through the town. The sidewalks were wet. A hard chill made my teeth rattle. By the time we turned down Washington, my Chuck Taylors were soaked through. I meant to buy a pair of boots when it got cold enough. Now that it was cold enough I had gotten used to wet feet. Every few yards we walked I sneaked a glance at Grey, embarrassed to admit to myself that I was afraid he’d embarrass me, until he said, “Quit it, you’re giving me the creeps.”
When we reached the address Drucilla had written on my hand, I thought we had the wrong place. The building looked like a factory rather than a house or an apartment building. Grey looked at me and I shrugged. There were lights on so we pulled open the heavy outside door. Music throbbed in the wall, something rhythmic and repetitive, the same eight notes turning over and over. The stairwell smelled of dust and sweeping compound and was dark except for a single black-light bulb high overhead, which illuminated trails of fluorescent spray paint on the walls that zigzagged to the top in three parallel sets of right angles, hugging the contour of the stairs. In the ultraviolet light, Grey’s dirty blue coverall looked suede black and his head a tarnished bronze, like the bust of some great man who’d gotten famous, gone bald, and died, all before he graduated from high school. He grinned, his teeth blue-white against the darkness of everything around them, and said, “I think I’m going to enjoy this.”
At the top, a second door, the music was louder now, and I recognized the song as “Atrocity Exhibition.” There had been something in Rolling Stone. The lead singer a suicide, his depression living on in the monotone voice.
We pushed through the second steel door and it opened on a bright and vast room. It was no warmer than it had been outside and the steam of our breath rose above us and fell in heavy clouds. To the left was a metal staircase leading to what looked like a catwalk. In front of us was a concrete floor in the center of this expanse, a room without walls: two old couches and battered armchairs, organized around an old Oriental rug and four or five space heaters with cords and extension cords spoking out toward the walls.
For all the space, the building was largely unused. On one of the couches sat Drucilla and the two girls from the theater, all done up like they were posing for the cover of a magazine—a magazine from forty years ago. Harriette was on one end, in mourning like always. In the middle sat Bea, in a beaded green dress that made her skin look yellow, and on the end, wearing a short gray dress, heavy black wool stockings, and looking like the last female of some exotic species smuggled in from the arctic, sat Drucilla Gordon.
Crowder appeared behind them, dressed in boots and lederhosen that must have taken an entire cow to make. Sing, behind him, wore a gold shirt of a shimmering fabric, and metal-flake pants and tennis shoes that had been spray-painted silver, so that he looked like one of those Greek messenger gods, one of the troublemaking kind, the sort that screwed up messages on purpose and started great wars.
When he saw us, Crowder’s bulging eyes fixed on me. Suddenly he stepped forward and grabbed me. “Jesus! We’re not doing this again!” he bellowed over his shoulder in a corny stage voice. “Run!” he said to me, “Run! Get out of here while you still can!”
Grey thought he was serious and stepped between us. Crowder looked at him soberly and turned to me, as though I’d been in on the joke all along. “Who’s this?” he asked.
“Grey,” I said.
Crowder released my lapels and straightened my collar. “Nice shirt,” he said and pushed Sing forward against obvious resistance. “And this is Harold, whom you’ve seen before and no doubt discussed.”
Harold Sing reached out his hand the way a woman would.
“That’s Bea,” Harold said, with a
jab of his thumb. “We found her passed out on the front step one day, and no one had the heart to tell her to leave.”
“Blow it out your ass, Harry,” Bea said.
Mike Majors suddenly appeared. “Harriette. And that’s Drucilla,” he said. “Call her Dru. How do you like our little clubhouse? Crowder’s dad owns the place. He told us he would let us hang out as long as we didn’t rip him off.”
“Where is everyone?” Grey asked.
“What do you mean?” Dru asked.
“I mean who else is coming?”
“Oh, no one, probably,” Bea said.
“We’re the only ones who ever come to our parties,” said Harriette. The comment hung in the air, as they all seemed to be weighing the truth of it.
“Which is why we’re so happy to have you here,” Dru said. “Please take off your coats.”
“That’s okay,” Grey said. “It’s freezing.”
“Yes, well we’re afraid that can’t be helped,” Sing said.
“What do you major in, Gary?” Majors asked.
“Varnish,” Grey said.
“What’s that?” Harold said.
“He doesn’t go to school. He fixes boats,” I said, realizing after it was too late how insulting that must have sounded.
“Is that like a boatwright?” Crowder asked.
“Is it like a glovemaker?” said Harriette, who sounded quite normal underneath the eyeliner and pancake makeup, “because we were just talking about glovemakers. Roy was telling us that Shakespeare’s dad was a glovemaker, because Dru lost her gloves and she was sad because it was an old pair that used to belong to her grandfather, and she could go buy another pair but they’d never be as good because it’s a lost art, glovemaking.”
“Nostalgic tripe,” Majors said.
“No one works with their hands anymore. That’s what we were talking about,” Dru said.
“They do,” Majors said, “but you’d never be able to afford anything they made—well you would. Gloves were cheap then because the workers were paid less than nothing to make them. Is that what you want?”