Maggie came in slowly, wary at having found her door unlocked, and dropped her keys when she saw Reed lying in the evening shadows on her couch. He smiled crookedly at her surprise, his lips cracked and tight with dried blood.
“Oh my God,” she said. “What happened to you? Were you in an accident?”
She crossed the room to him and pushed back his hair to examine his bruise. Reed moved her hands away. She was left poised, her hands inches from him, fingers curved to the shape of his head.
“Bill Hoffman and I got into a fight,” he said.
“What?” she said. “That’s insane. You’re grown men.”
“That doesn’t make it any less the truth,” he said.
“Let me guess,” she said, holding his chin, despite his efforts to prevent her, and turning his face slowly back and forth, examining him. “Bill won. It serves you right. You look like you were thrown from a moving car.”
Maggie put two fingers inside a rip in his shirt that he hadn’t noticed before and touched his chest. Her fingers were cold and she left them there until they warmed a little on his skin. She plucked a bit of leaf from his hair. He turned on a lamp beside them and they squinted at each other in the new light. She was kneeling next to the couch, rocked back on her heels. He liked the way she was looking at him. Maggie stood and kicked off her shoes and padded into the kitchen.
“If he won,” Reed said to the swinging door, “it was a Pyrrhic victory.”
He could hear the sink running, drawers opening and closing.
“Hi John gets out tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve been sitting here thinking we might go together to pick him up. He would like that.”
“That sounds nice,” she said over the rush of running water.
Maggie returned with two washcloths, one wrapping ice and another soaked in warm water. She made him slide over and sat on the edge of the couch next to him. She pressed the ice to his temple and lifted his hand to it, so he would hold it there. With the other cloth, she brushed his face, wiping his forehead first and working gently down along the bridge of his nose. The washcloth stung where it touched his wounds but in a strangely pleasant way, the way muscles ache after a long, satisfying exercise.
“I want you to tell me everything,” Maggie said.
He didn’t say anything for a long time, just lay still and let her press the washcloth to his cheeks, run it over his lips. She was turned to him in such a way that one side of her face was lit completely by the lamplight, the other side drawn in shadow. She pushed his eyelids gently closed with her fingertips. Water streamed down his cheeks and he thought it must have looked like he was crying.
Gerald’s Monkey
Gerald wanted a monkey and Wishbone said he could get it for him. Wishbone had a man on the inside. The three of us were burning out badly rusted floor sections of a tuna rig called Kaga and welding new pieces in their place, patchwork repairs, like making a quilt of metal. A lot of Japanese fisheries were having ships built in the states; labor was cheaper or something. This hold was essentially a mass grave for marine life and it stunk like the dead. The smell never comes out, Gerald told me, even if you sandblasted the paint off the walls. The door to the next room had been sealed, so there was only one way in, an eight-by-ten-foot square in the ceiling, and it was almost too hot to draw breath. They seemed connected somehow, the heat and that awful smell, two parts of the same swampy thing.
“Will it be a spider monkey?” Gerald said.
Wishbone shut down his burner and looked at Gerald.
“I don’t know. My Jap gets all the good shit. It’ll eat bananas,” Wishbone said. “It’ll scratch its ass. Shit, Gerald. Will it be a spider monkey?”
“Spider monkeys make the best pets,” Gerald said.
“Gerald, what the hell do you want with a monkey?” I said.
Gerald started to answer, paused in his burning, white sparks settling around his gloved hands, but Wishbone cut him off. He said to me, “Do not speak until you are spoken to, little man.” His voice was muffled and deepened by his welding mask. “A monkey Gerald wants, a monkey Gerald gets. Now, run and fetch me some cigarettes.”
He stood and stretched his legs. Wishbone was one large black man. With his welding mask down and black leather smock and gloves and long, thick legs running down into steel-toed work boots, he looked like a badass Darth Vader.
“Wishbone, can you read?” I said.
He snapped his mask up. His face was running with sweat and his eyes were bloodshot and angry. He was high on something. This was my second summer at my uncle’s shipyard, and the best I could tell, Wishbone was always high.
“Did you speak, little man? I hope not.”
I didn’t say anything else, just pointed at the sign behind him—DO NOT SMOKE, painted in red block letters on plywood. The torches burn on a combination of pure oxygen and acetylene and sometimes tiny holes wear in the lines from use. The welding flames themselves generally burn off all the leaking oxygen and gas, but shut down the torches and give the gas a little time to collect in the air, then add a spark, and the world is made of fire. A spark is rarely enough but why test the percentages? There’s a story around the yard about a guy who’d been breathing the fumes for hours with his torch unlit. When he went to fire it up, he inhaled a spark and the air in his lungs ignited. Afterward, he looked okay on the surface, nothing damaged, but his insides were charcoal, hollowed out by fire.
Wishbone glanced over his shoulder at the sign, looked back at me, shrugged. He reached under his smock and came out with a rumpled pack of Winstons. He put a bent cigarette between his lips, struck a match, and held it just away from the tip.
“This is my last cigarette,” he said. “You have till I am finished to get your ass up from the floor and out to the wagon for a new pack. Let me be clear. If you are not back before I put my boot on this thing, I’m gonna beat you like a rented mule.” He spoke real slow like I was his Jap connection and my English wasn’t so good. “Do you understand?”
I got to my feet reluctantly. I didn’t want him to know that I was afraid. I said, “Gerald, you need anything?” Gerald shook his head and gave me a wave.
I sidled to the ladder and climbed it slow and easy, no hurry, but once topside, I was gone, the fastest white boy on earth, dumping equipment as I ran, a jackrabbit, skirting welders and shipfitters on the deck, clanging down the gangplank, then up over the cyclone fence, headed for the supply wagon. It was ninety-five degrees out, wet July heat in lower Alabama, but after the hold, it felt good, almost cold. Goose bumps rose lightly on my skin.
Wishbone got off on razzing me. White kid, sixteen, owner’s nephew, gone with the summer anyhow. I was his wet dream. We had worked together for a week last summer, my first time on a welding crew, and even then he had no patience for me. He ignored me for the whole week, just looked away whenever I spoke, concentrated on the skittering sparks and pretended I wasn’t there. The cigarette runs were a new addition, but I didn’t mind so much. Probably, he wouldn’t have roughed me up, if I had refused to play along. He would have been fired, maybe jailed, and he knew it, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
Summers at the shipyard were a family tradition. Learn the value of a dollar by working hard for it, that sort of thing. I’d drag myself home in the evenings, caked with filth, feeling drained empty, like I’d spent the day donating blood, and there my sister would be, fresh and blonde and lovely, stretched languorously on the couch in front of the television. She’d have on white tennis shorts and maybe still be wearing her bikini top. She spent her summer days reading by the pool, her nights out with one boy or another. She had tattooed a rose just below her belly button by applying a decal and letting the sun darken the skin around it.
“Give me the fucking remote,” I’d say.
“Blow me.”
She was eighteen, off to the university in the fall. Fifty-one days, I’d tell myself, that’s all. It was usually evening by the time I got home and the last of the
daylight would be slanting in through the banks of long windows, making everything look dreamy and slow. My sister would yawn and change the channel just to show me she could.
“I’m gonna sit down now, Virginia, and take off my boots and socks,” I’d say. “You have until I am barefoot to hand it over or I will beat you like a rented mule.”
She would smile pretty, adjust her position on the couch so she was facing me, draw her smooth knees up to her belly, get comfortable. She’d yell, “Mo-om,” stretching the word into two hair-raising syllables, “Mom, Ford’s acting tough again.”
Gerald brought a monkey book to the shipyard, smuggled it in under his coveralls, and the two of us sat around on a break flipping through it. He was an older man, nearing fifty, his dark skin drawn tight over his features, worn to a blunt fineness. He had been working for my uncle almost twenty years. Wishbone lay on his back with his fingers linked on his chest, washed in the rectangle of light that fell through to us. He owned the traces of breeze that drifted down through the hatch. I had the book open across my knees, a droplight in one hand, my back against the bluish-white wall. Gerald was kneeling in front of me, watching for my reaction.
“See there?” he said. “See where it says about spider monkeys make the best pets?”
He reached over the book and tapped a page, leaving a sweaty fingerprint. I flipped pages, looking for the passage that he wanted, past capuchins and Guerezas with their skunk coloring, past howler monkeys and macaques, until I came to the section on spider monkeys. I said, “Okay, I got it.”
“Read it to me,” he said.
I cleared my throat. “Spider monkey, Ateles paniscus, characterized by slenderness and agility. They frequent, in small bands, the tallest forest trees, moving swiftly by astonishing leaps, sprawling out like spiders, and catching by their perfectly prehensile tails. Their faces are shaded by projecting hairs, blah, blah, blah, ten species between Brazil and central Mexico …” I skimmed along the page with the droplight. “Okay, here we go. They are mild, intelligent, and make interesting pets. There it is, Gerald.”
I tried to hand him the book, but he pushed it back to me.
“Look at the pitcher,” he said. “Look at those sad faces.”
In the middle of the page was a close-up photograph of two baby spider monkeys. Gerald was right about their faces. They did look sad and maybe a little frightened, their wide eyes full of unvoiced expression, like human children, their hair mussed as if from sleep, their mouths turned down slightly in stubborn monkey frowns.
“Don’t nobody got a monkey,” Gerald said.
“Michael fucking Jackson got a monkey,” Wishbone said.
We turned to look at him. He hadn’t moved, was still stretched in the light, legs straight as a corpse. I had thought he was asleep. Gerald said, “Michael Jackson’s nobody I know.”
“Michael Jackson has a chimpanzee, Wishbone,” I said. “There’s a difference.”
Wishbone sat up slowly, drew in one knee, and slung his arm over it. He looked handsome, almost beautiful in the harsh sunlight, his eyes narrow, his smile easy, perspiration beaded on his dark face. He looked so mysterious, just then, I thought that if I could catch him in the right light, strike a match at an exact moment, I would see diamonds or something beneath the surface of his skin.
He got to his feet, walked over, and squatted in front of me. He snatched the book from my hands. “The food of the spider monkey is mainly fruit and insects.” Wishbone enunciated each word carefully. He winked at Gerald, then leaned toward me until his face was close enough to mine that I could feel his breath on my cheeks. “In certain countries, their flesh is considered a delicacy.” He closed the book and passed it to Gerald without taking his eyes from me. He rooted around under his coveralls, found what he was looking for, and dangled it in front of me. “You know the routine,” he said, an empty cigarette pack between two fingers.
I took my time on Wishbone’s errand. He hadn’t given me a countdown so I thought I’d at least make him wait a while for his nicotine. The shipyard was on skeleton crew since we lost the navy contract—four hundred people out of work at my uncle’s company alone—and the Kaga was one of only three ships in for repairs, leaving seven dry docks empty, rising up along the waterfront like vacant stadiums. I wandered into the next yard over, yard five, thinking about Gerald’s monkey. I wondered if Wishbone could actually get it for him or if that was just talk. I hoped he could for Gerald’s sake. Cruel to lead him on. I had this picture in my head of Gerald at home in an easy chair, the television on in front of him and this spider monkey next to him on the arm of the chair, curling its tail around his shoulders. It was a nice picture. They were sharing an orange, each of them slipping damp wedges of fruit into the other’s mouth.
I could hear the lifting cranes churning behind me, men shouting, metal banging on metal but yard five was still and quiet. Dust puffed up beneath my steps. The infrequent wind made me shiver. Two rails set wide apart, used for launching ships, ran down to the water’s edge and I balanced myself on one and teetered down the slope to the water. A barge lumbered along the river with seagulls turning circles in the air above it.
When I was nine years old, my parents took me to the launching of a two-hundred-foot yacht, the Marie Paul, built here for a California millionaire. My family had been invited for the maiden voyage, and we mingled with the beautiful strangers under a striped party tent, which sheltered a banquet of food and champagne and where a Dixieland band fizzed on an improvised stage in the corner. There were tuxedos and spangled cocktail dresses along with the canary-yellow hard hats that my uncle required. The women from California wore short dresses, dresses my mother never would have worn, exposing tan and slender legs that seemed to grow longer when they danced.
One of these women proclaimed me the cutest thing in my miniature tuxedo and hard hat. She hauled me away to dance, my mother shooing me politely along despite my protests. We did the stiff-legged foxtrot that Mother and I did at home, the only dance I knew. “Loosen up, baby,” the woman said, stepping away from me after only a few turns. “Dance like you mean it.” She shimmied around me, overwhelmed me, the rustle of her dress and swish of her hair, her hands slipping over my arms and shoulders, her perfume and warm champagne breath, her brown thighs gliding together, her exposed throat and collarbone. This woman did the christening, shattering a bottle of champagne on the prow. The Marie Paul was the most magnificent thing I’d ever seen, with a sleek stern and muscular bow, like a tapered waist and broad chest. It was polished incandescent white with a swimming pool at the rear, a helicopter pad on the topmost deck, and four Boston Whalers to serve as landing craft strapped to the foredeck and covered with purple tarp. Workmen on overtime scurried in its shadow, double-checking. My dance partner was tiny beneath its bulk.
Ships are launched sideways, set on giant rollers and drawn down the tracks with heavy cable. When that one hit the water and careened to starboard, sending up a tidal wave of spray, I thought she would go under, that she would keep rolling, slip beneath the slow, brown water and go bubbling to the bottom. I screamed in panic and shut my eyes. My mother pulled me against her leg and said, “It’s all right, Ford, honey. Look, it won’t sink. See, it’s fine.” The Marie Paul found her balance, came swaying upright, thick waves rushing away from her on both sides, as if drawn ashore by our cheering. Tugboats motored in, like royal attendants, to push her out to deeper water.
I met my uncle on my way back from the supply wagon. He was giving three Japanese men a tour of the yard, all of them in business suits and yellow hard hats. When he spotted me, he yelled my name and waved me over. I stashed Wishbone’s cigarettes in my pocket.
“I’d like you gentlemen to meet my nephew,” my uncle said, slapping my shoulder. “He’s learning the business from the ground up.”
I wiped my palms on my coveralls and shook the hands that were offered. Each of the men gave me a crisp bow. They wore black leather shoes, recently filmed
over with dust. Since last summer, I had grown three inches. I had my uncle’s size, now, and both of us towered over them.
“Hard work,” the oldest man said. He made his voice stern and gravelly, as if to imply that physical labor was good for you.
“Yes, sir.”
“You better believe it,” my uncle said. “No cakewalk for this boy.”
My uncle was grooming me. He had no children of his own. Money-wise, my old man did all right as well, exploring the wonders of gynecology, but as I had thus far displayed a distinct lack of biological acumen in school, my parents viewed the shipyard as the best course for my future. My father’s routine sounded considerably more pleasant, but I didn’t argue.
“Ford, these gentlemen own the Kaga.” My uncle put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “They’re thinking about letting us build them another one. Wanted to see a work in progress.”
“She’s a fine boat,” I said and they bowed again.
“Arigato.”
Normally, there was a cluster of men dawdling at the supply wagon but there were no customers now. No one wanted to be caught loafing. All around us, men were busy at their jobs—swarming on deck, unloading a hauling truck over by the warehouse—like a movie version of a bustling shipyard. The air had a faint tar smell and was full of wild echoes, the resolute clamor of progress, the necessary bang of making something from nothing. If you stepped back from it a second, weren’t sweating in the guts of the thing, it was sort of heartening. You could almost see giant ships growing up out of the ground.
Dogfight Page 6