I like the picture because it is the same with me only the words are, “He loves me not. He loves me not. He loves me not.” I don’t mean God or my father. I mean Jude the sailor, the mortal I love.
LETTING GO OF RED
Jude came home from the war in Iraq a year and a half after the president had declared the war was over. He wasn’t even supposed to be there at all. He’d already served three years and seven months of his term, but when the war started he decided to stay on for a bit. He needed the money. He doesn’t own a fishing boat and so he didn’t have much choice as there is almost no other way for men to make money here.
When he finally got home we took a walk out on the small part of the bay that freezes every year. Since I was older than when he had left and had been pining for him the entire time he was gone, writing him love letters every single week, I thought that the purpose of the walk would be that he was finally planning on collapsing on the ground before me, planning to bring his lips to my winter boots and make out with them, writhing with love. This however turned out not to be the purpose of the walk. Jude was war-torn. He was distracted and I found that I had to make eye contact with him before I started talking or else he might not realize that I was speaking to him. Since he got home he’d been drinking a lot and taking some pills that an Army social worker had gotten for him when he was still enlisted. I was frustrated as he’d been gone a year and a half and there were lots of things I wanted to tell him and this made it hard. “Jude.” Wait for eye contact. He looks. Continue talking. “When you were gone the bay didn’t freeze and they said it was because of global warming but I don’t think so. I think it was because I’d come down here looking across the ocean to see where you went. I kept the ocean warm loving you. Can you imagine what—” A bird flew overhead and Jude turned his attention away. I lost him.
“I want to move to Mexico,” he said. “Or Canada. I don’t care which one.”
“Why? You didn’t kill anybody, right?”
A fisherman had cut a circular hole in the ice and we stood on either side. Jude reached down through the hole. He didn’t answer. “I went to the Middle East on board a supply ship that was carrying some Bradley fighting vehicles and some other shit. There were these holding stations in the bottom of the ship that were five stories below the surface of the ocean. There was a strange pressure on your brain down there.”
“Like the bends?”
“Like the pressure of a ship full of supplies and soldiers who are off to war and are too scared to speak and so start screaming at the ocean after days out at sea. Down in the hold, the screams echo. I swear to God, the hold holds onto the yelling and bounces it around.”
Jude didn’t go to Mexico and he didn’t go to Canada. Instead he tore up his Social Security card while I watched. He thought that was a good idea until he was denied military disability because his body wasn’t wounded, just his head. So he went down to the welfare office to apply, but the first document they wanted to see from him was his Social Security card. So Jude gave up on the government.
When Jude got home from Iraq he went back to his old job fishing. It doesn’t pay well but it does pay him in cash at the end of each day depending on what is caught. It’s what he used to do before he joined the Army. He’s good at it, but if you don’t own your own boat it’s a very hard way to live.
“I already served my four years so I thought about deserting. I didn’t want to kill other poor people. I didn’t want anything to do with the war anymore. But if you desert, the Army hires brutal guys who hunt you down and turn in AWOL soldiers for money. They throw you in a military prison that would make a regular prison look like a resort. You have no rights and the people guarding you are other soldiers so they really want to kill you for deserting. I didn’t have the spine for it but I thought about it every day.”
Even though Jude is back from the war he still is not my boyfriend the way I thought he would be. But he stays close by and he takes care of me. When I need it, he’ll shake my hand with a twenty dollar bill folded up inside his palm. He passes me the money, smiling like he’s a big-time crime boss or like he’s my father. When I come down to the docks to meet his boat he stands directly behind me, his shoulder and thigh touching mine so that an ex-con named Larry, who was sent to prison for arson though every one knows he also killed his girlfriend, will stop leering the way he does at anything female. Jude and I see each other every day. Last week he brought me a miniature bouquet, like a bouquet for a mouse. It was one or two purple asters, their stems wrapped in the foil from a peppermint patty. Sometimes he comes by after noon, after the boat he fishes for gets in, or else he’ll drop by before he goes out drinking or sometimes if he’s feeling badly he’ll make a howling sound, a coyote noise, late, late at night outside my window. I’ll look down into the street at him and when he sees me he stops howling and just looks at me until he calms down. We don’t talk but stare at each other through the glass of the window. After fifteen minutes or so he usually goes home to bed.
Jude is in my kitchen watching me get lunch for my grandfather, a tin of tuna fish with some crackers soaked in the fish-packing oil. My grandfather is in the living room typesetting his dictionary, like a crossword puzzle but a bit more involved. He is working on the etymology of the word “hold,” as in a ship’s hold. He’ll go back centuries, looking through old dictionaries, cross-referencing any usage, searching for the word’s birth. When I bring him his lunch I ask, “What have you found?”
“Well, the word hold is Dutch in origin. It’s actually hol and shares a root with hollow.”
“That’s nice.” Jude is sitting on our kitchen stool with his legs gently parted.
“But even closer in origin,” my grandfather continues, taking a bite of the tuna fish, “is the word hell.”
I pass Jude in the kitchen and I can smell him. He has been drinking. Still he smells good. “Come here, girl,” he says and pulls me towards him so that I can feel his breath on my neck. Jude and I do not have any regular sort of relationship. He is not my boyfriend. He says he is too old to be my boyfriend. But he pulls me onto his lap. He breathes in my ear. He has never kissed me despite his kissing most girls who live here, this far north. Jude thinks he is too old for me. I think I could cut a strip of flesh from his upper arm and eat it.
“You smell like 3-in-One,” he tells me.
I think that is a compliment until I realize he means the appliance oil. I think on it a bit longer and open my neck up, 3-in-One. He holds me. He hollows me. He hells me.
He doesn’t talk about the women he goes out with and when I ask him he says, “But that’s got nothing to do with you and me.” That’s not the way I see it, and so eventually Jude gets drunk and then I ask him and then he tells me everything, not just about the women but everything. “We did it in the basement of the ironworks,” he’ll say, or, “You know her husband doesn’t care what she does at night,” or, “Those cuts on my ribs are because I am trying to open gills before the flood comes.” So he doesn’t really have any secrets and he doesn’t really have any gills because where he cut himself scarred up with thick, white, foamy tissue and nobody could breathe through that.
Twice since he’s been back I have seen Jude walking with women who I know are his girlfriends. Once I saw Jude and a woman waiting outside the SeaScrubbers Laundromat. It was cold out but the woman and Jude stood outside. The woman was standing behind Jude and using her fingers like a comb through his hair. I watched for as long as I could until I began to imagine that she was yanking his hair out in clumps and dropping it on the sidewalk that was already filthy with dryer lint. I was so mad. I realized that if she actually did yank out Jude’s hair it would make me happy, so I walked away. The second time I saw him with another woman, it was a different woman. I remember this one because Jude was sitting with her in the Reach Road Restaurant and they were sitting on the same side of a booth. The other bench was just empty, like they didn’t care what other people thought.
When I see him walking with women that I don’t know I feel how I am not a part of this town. I feel as though I were floating in the surf and saw him on dry land with another woman but when I swim to shore I realize too late that I don’t have legs but a big tail and then I am beached and suffocating and the people who live in town are poking me with a stick wondering, “What the hell is she?” I can’t breathe. When I see Jude with women that I don’t know I feel like my eyes are suffocating me. What I see is choking me. Jude’s girlfriends hurt me. They take my breath away and leave a mark like the bright-blue residue on my eyes after flash photography. In the moment that I stop breathing the picture of whatever burned me becomes trapped. I’ll see a blue afterimage and it looks like Jude in a cheap bar with a woman cheaper than me.
I asked an ophthalmologist for help. He comes to town once a month, like the full moon. He is part of a traveling medical clinic paid for by the state for poor people. I thought that because of this he was probably stretched too thin. I worried he wouldn’t grasp the subtleties of my problem. When I called to make the appointment a tired nurse inquired, “Well, what seems to be the problem?” So I told her I was in love so badly that it was affecting my vision.
“Are you wasting my time?” she asked.
“No, Miss.” I realized too late that I should have said Ma’am instead of Miss.
“Well the doctor’s got an opening next Tuesday. Come then.”
On Tuesday there is a selection of old magazines in the state’s waiting room. Some are catalogs, some are for horse owners or women or amateur photographers or doctors and medical students. I take one of these with me into Examination Room B. After five minutes or so the doctor enters. He switches on a very narrow piercing light for looking into eyes. He asks, “Well, what seems to be the problem?” So I tell him.
“I am in love and it is affecting my vision.” He looks to the left. He looks to the right. He clears his throat. He steps outside the examining room to perhaps consult a medical journal. He takes the opportunity to visit the patient in Examination Room A. I pick up the magazine where I left off. Inside, there is a story of an overweight hemophiliac and the danger his own weight poses. The hemophiliac bleeds without ever breaking his skin, bruises that slip loose and navigate between his skin and his flesh as though through the Erie Canal at night.
The article is breathtaking and so I see a blue afterimage of it crawl across the leather case of lenses. In ten minutes the doctor returns. I ask him, “Doctor, how is a hemophiliac like blue?”
He looks extremely puzzled. “Look, I’m an ophthalmologist,” he says.
It is easy. Neither can stop letting go of red.
“We’ll just keep an eye on this situation,” he says. “See me in a month. My girl will make an appointment for you.”
I think the trouble with my eyes started because they don’t have enough pigment. They are no more colorful than ice with a little blue in them. Eyes are an exception to ocean, sky, and blood. Eyes can be blue where there is oxygen. That is a theory concerning my condition that I have yet to discuss with my ophthalmologist.
ROGUES
The Seas, a motel where I sometimes chambermaid, sits a bit higher than the other motels so that its broad and weathered sign dominates much of its landscape. This motel is not popular with tourists because the largeness of its sign seems desperate.
The woman who owns the Seas named the rooms after different famous hurricanes and leaves cards in each room to describe the storm. It is creepy. So even if a French-Canadian couple wound up at the motel accidentally, chances are they would find it weird and not return the following summer.
The woman who owns the motel could sleep in a different room every night if she wanted to, but usually she stays close to Andrew or the Galveston Hurricane. That way, she told me, if the office phone rings she can hear the answering machine pick up through the walls. So much stillness in the day, she sits on the curb outside the line of empty rooms. She smokes. She’s not very old but the cigarettes help her to feel like she is.
She is gloomy like that because both her brother and her father were tuna fishermen who never came back. “They weren’t even on the same vessel,” she tells me while I am roller-brooming a room, Hugo, and she is smoking, watching me sweep. “But it was one of those storms where a hole opens up in the ocean and seven vessels were lost in one day.”
“Hmm,” I say and continue cleaning.
“Why do you think the ocean would do that?” she asks.
“Well,” I pull out some science. “I think that it has to do with wind speed, fetch, and the curvature of the globe,” I say. She looks at me as though I had just dumped a pile of insult onto the carpeted floor I am cleaning and rubbed it in good with the heel of my shoe. I stop roller-sweeping. “Why? Why do you think the ocean would do that?”
She has some more of her cigarette, “I always thought it was because the ocean is like a one-of-a-kind thing, like there is nothing else similar to it in the entire world and so the ocean feels no love, no mother, no father or husband, like a space alien. I always thought that just made it an extremely nasty and greedy thing, like an only child.”
“Hmm,” I say and nothing else. I am an only child but I need my job so I keep my mouth shut.
There is a lot of this kind of sadness here. It slips in like the fog at night. The fog that creeps out of the ocean to survey the land that one day she thinks will eventually be hers.
Later, after I get home from work, my mother wants to know what I am doing since it is Saturday night and I am a young woman. If she pesters me and makes me go out, I’ll go to Jude’s. He has an old stethoscope. I’ll listen to his heart through his shirt so his scars of gill-cutting don’t show. I’ll close the bathroom door though not all the way. I’ll lift my shirt. Jude will peek through the half-closed door. I will listen to my own heart. Then I’ll hold the stethoscope above the mold in the shower and it will say, “We never would have left the ocean had we known what a horrible place this is.” And I’ll say, “Me too.”
After the woman who owns the Seas asked me about why the ocean would make such a storm that both her father and brother would die in it, I asked Jude about it. He didn’t know why exactly but he said that on the surface of the ocean, the tallest theoretical wave made by the wind could reach a height of one hundred and ninety-eight feet. This would be called a rogue, any wave over seventy feet is called that. He told me little is known of these waves because if you see one you most often die. These rogue waves usually come in threes. The three sisters is what they are called. Just like the dry land to name the cruel things in the water after women.
The man who traversed the crevassed glacier with brass tacks in his shoes, the man whose picture is tacked to my wall, had arrived at Elephant Island in nothing more than a large launch. He’d left most of his shipwrecked men behind when he went for help. In the launch he saw one of these rogue waves, but because of its height and absolutely straight-up slope it did not make him think of water. The man pointed to the foaming crest of the wave rising above him and said to his crew, “Look at that strange cloud.” That is how tall the wave was. He, somehow, lived though that wave.
A rogue wave would stick out like this: Imagine you are reading a book and have arrived at a certain page, but imagine that when you arrived at that page, instead of being five inches wide it is one hundred and ninety-eight feet wide. So wide that when you turn the page it crushes you, pins you underneath it. You would never make it to here.
THE SURRENDER PLACES
My mother is a small woman, five two. She is strong but her bones are tiny, and sometimes when I hug her I can feel her heart beat through her chest like the battering of an insect trapped in a lamp.
This town goes to bed very early but my mother does not. She doesn’t sleep well without my father and so she avoids sleep or she fakes it. She likes the town better at night. She likes things to be quiet. It is what she is used to.
There is a school on a
n island just off the coast a few hours south of here. It is a school for deaf children and, outside of the school’s building, there is nothing on the island but the founder’s pet cemetery. Horses, dogs, birds, and cats mostly. My mother grew up on this island. Both of her parents were deaf. Her father was the Plant and Property Man responsible for haying a small meadow, shoveling snow, mulching trees, repairing busted desks, washing the chalkboards at night, replacing rotten stairs and broken windows. My mother’s mother worked in administration typing health records, report cards, annual budgets in triplicate, and, twice, certified depositions on the accidental deaths of two children enrolled in the school, one drowned, one jumped.
Of the fifty to sixty people who lived on the island there were very few people who could hear things. My mother was one of them. She loved living on the island. She liked not talking and was annoyed that her parents sent her on a ferry every morning to a school for hearing people.
One surprising thing she told me about life on the island was that deaf people are actually very loud, especially deaf children. The reason is because they cannot hear to gauge the volume of their guttural emissions or excited shrieks. In fact my mother says she grew up accustomed to hearing her parents have sex because neither of them could hear the mighty creak their bed made and she was too embarrassed to tell them. So my mother was one of the few people on the island who could hear foghorns at night and seagulls in the morning, and being responsible for so much listening made her a very quiet person.
On the island my mother had a best friend named Marie. Marie was a very good lip-reader because Marie had not been born deaf but lost her hearing swimming in a quarry that, after years, had filled with rain. Something was living in the water, Marie had told my mom, and whatever it was filled her ears and ruined her hearing with an infection. So Marie could talk a little bit, though my mother said Marie sounded like a donkey when she spoke. They’d run to the pet cemetery, and my mother couldn’t help but think that the animals were probably pricking up their ears down in their graves thinking that Marie was talking to them. She told Marie her theory. Marie brayed even louder. She wasn’t one to get offended because she sounded like a donkey. After that, the two of them always had it in their heads that they could talk to animals, even dead ones, and that was how they enjoyed themselves on the island.
The Seas Page 3