by Paul Watkins
No one answered when I pounded at the trap door, so I walked out of the building and up a small iron staircase to the box room entrance.
The door was heavy and armoured and blue, propped open to let in the breeze. I walked in. Rows and rows of musty-smelling cardboard stretched out in front of me.
Claudette caught up with me at the end of an aisle. ‘How many times I got to tell you, you can’t come up here! Vic won’t allow it! You want a box, you bang on the trap door!’ She pointed at me, as if there were others standing nearby and she needed to single me out. ‘I know you! I know your face from a dozen other faces!’
‘I banged on the trap door. No one answered.’ I looked round while she figured out what to say next.
Clean, I was thinking.
No fish, I thought to myself.
It must take less than fifteen seconds to fold one of these boxes together and East Bay uses only about two hundred boxes a day. Hardly any work at all.
I know why you don’t let anyone up here. So they can’t see how little work you do. I nodded, still looking around.
She knew what I was thinking. She yelled at me again to get out.
‘Vic sent me up here to work for you.’ I spat out the lie. The words fell like marbles from my mouth.
‘I don’t need any help. You tell Vic I don’t need help.’
‘I’ll do all the work. You won’t have to do anything. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’ I spoke quickly, the sentences running together.
She tipped her face to one side, a red baseball cap wedged onto her head. ‘When’d he tell you this?’
‘Today. Just now. Just tell me what needs doing and I’ll do it. You go ahead and take a break. You look tired.’
‘It’s hard work.’ She eyed me, trying to see through the lie so she could send me away and keep the box room door locked from now on.
‘I’m ready to work. Just tell me what to do, Claudette.’
‘Well,’ she plodded across to an open space where she folded the boxes. ‘All you got to do is make boxes.’ Then she wheeled around and pointed at me again. ‘But it isn’t so easy as you think!’
*
To cover the tracks of the lie, I told Vic that Claudette had asked me to help her in the box room on a permanent basis.
Vic rested his elbows on his desk and touched the tips of his fingers together. Then he stood up, edged over to the coffee machine and poured himself a mugful, thick and black like creosote.
On the wall behind his desk was a chart of fish caught in New England waters and a calendar with women in bathing suits standing on the decks of trawlers. In big letters and in several languages under this month’s picture was ‘Protect Ocean Cables’.
Vic raised his eyebrows, a solid line of hair running across the base of his forehead which Ramsey called Unibrow. ‘Normally, I wouldn’t agree to something like this. But I like you, James.’
This was an even bigger lie than the one I’d just told him.
He rubbed his knuckles back and forth across his gritted teeth. From the look on his face, it seemed to me he thought I had some information on him. Now he was afraid I’d hurt him with what I knew. ‘I run this company. You know that, don’t you, James?’
‘Yes.’
‘People do what I tell them to do.’
I nodded.
He waved me away.
As I reached the door, he stood and cleared his throat. ‘So how are things with you and Emily?’
‘Things aren’t with me and Emily, Mr Vogel.’
He hiked his trousers up into his balls. ‘Glad to hear it.’
I told Ramsey that Vic had transferred me to the box room to work for Claudette. ‘Vic said it was “Definite Confirmed”.’
‘That isn’t right.’ He dropped his cigarette into a barrel McFarlane was wheeling past. ‘I’m going to check up on this.’
‘Vic’s the boss. What can I say?’
‘Shit is what you can say. Shit and shit and shit! Who’s going to work in the ice room? I can’t ever get people to work in there. I’m going to check on this.’ He set down his pen and walked off the warehouse floor.
I knew he wouldn’t talk to Vic. They hated each other.
Vic would have fired him ages ago, but Ramsey belonged to a union and besides, he knew the way Vic ran his business. They’d both been at the place so long there was nothing left to do but hate.
Later, on my lunch break, as I walked out to the warm dust of the parking lot, I saw Ramsey standing on the end of the pier. He was talking to McFarlane. McFarlane leaned on his trolley and barked, ‘Why should I?’
‘It’s only for a little while.’ Ramsey slapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’ll get one of the Cong to dump your barrels.’
McFarlane tipped the barrel on its side. The load of fishguts fell away in a slow spread of oil and scales. Little flounder eyes stared up from a tangle of empty skin, sad and distant and sinking into the green of the bay. ‘This is my job.’ He set the barrel upright on his trolley. ‘I’m good at it. And I can’t stand being in the cold.’
‘It’s only for a little while,’ Ramsey was saying. ‘Just a little, little while.’
Claudette and I sat on the roof of the East Bay Plant making boxes.
I clocked her in for work at nine. She showed up around ten with doughnuts and coffee.
By that time, I’d have made all the boxes for the day.
For the rest of the time, she made stews in a crock pot with ingredients she’d brought with her from home.
I peeled carrots and potatoes while she thumbed through cookbooks.
We took turns sitting by the trap door.
When someone banged on the door, we waited a minute before opening and then sounded impatient, as if we had no time to spare.
At four, when the stew had simmered for a few hours, she poured some into a bowl for me and took the rest home to her family.
‘You’re the one who’s screwing Emily, aren’t you?’ She leaned back in her chair, baseball cap shading her face.
‘No, I’m not. What makes you think that?’ I squinted at her through the glare off the packing house roof.
‘People say you are.’
‘Well, I’m not.’ I put a box on my head to shield my eyes from the sun.
‘She acts as if you are.’ She leaned across and rested her hand on my knee. Her skin was wrinkled and blue-veined with brown spots. ‘I know what you’re worried about. You’re worried Vic is such a jealous father that he’ll rip your head off and stick it on the flagpole.’ She nodded at the pole outside the front office.’
‘I have a girlfriend someplace else.’ This was another lie.
‘So how come you’re always driving away with her in the car?’ She snorted through her sharp nose. ‘I see everything from up here on the roof.’
‘Just don’t spread any rumours, Claudette. I could do without that.’
‘It’s Emily who spreads the rumours.’
‘Why? Do you know why?’
‘Maybe she wants to get her father mad at you. You know, some people say they aren’t even father and daughter.’
‘I heard that.’
‘I seen some things from up here that would make you think about it.’ She emptied a can of mushroom soup into the crock pot and added white wine from a thermos.
I walked up the Escape Road to my bus stop. It was called the Escape Road because, in hurricanes that sometimes ruined Galilee, it offered the only way out to safety.
Sun hung in yellow beams across bulrushes growing at the roadside.
I turned to look back at Galilee, its dockyard spiked with the raised outriggers of fishing boats.
Emily’s Camaro was coming toward me from the plant. I turned and started walking again, hoping she would pass on. But she stopped. She opened the passenger door and told me to get in.
I rested my hands on the hot roof of the car and leaned down. ‘I need to talk with you. People have been saying things about us that will lo
se me my job. It’s not the job I’m afraid of losing, Emily. I’m afraid of what my father will do to me.’
‘I have to talk to you as well, Pfeif. So get in.’
For a while we didn’t speak.
She drove us out to the lighthouse at Castle Point and parked the car next to a building where wedding receptions took place most weekends in the summer.
‘You have to quit.’ She fed herself a cigarette and lit it with a lighter that hung on a leather strap from her rear-view mirror. Then she sat back and puffed smoke, waiting to see what I’d say.
‘Is this all because we’re not friends like we used to be? Because I didn’t get this job just so I could see you? So you go get me fired?’
‘That’s not the reason.’
‘Then what is?’
‘I can’t tell you right now.’
‘My father’s going to kill me when he hears I’ve been fired.’ I put my hands behind my neck and squeezed at the muscles. ‘He’ll pull me apart.’
‘I’m just telling you for your own good that you have to quit.’
‘What did you tell your dad about us?’
‘Nothing. Nothing to tell.’
‘I’ve been hearing some rumours.’
‘If you’ve been hearing any rumours, they probably came from Claudette. That’s all she ever does. Make up rumours.’
‘It was Claudette who told me.’
‘There you are.’
‘So why do I have to quit? Because we’re not getting along like you wanted us to?’
‘I’m telling you this because I like you. Understand? Let’s not talk about it any more. Just collect your pay and go.’
I opened my mouth to speak, then sighed and closed it again. I looked at the evenness of her face and her dark eyes and for a moment I couldn’t remember why we didn’t get along any more.
I walked into Vic’s office the next morning.
Emily was there. As soon as she saw me, she turned away and began to write up the day’s fish prices on a blackboard.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Vogel. I have to quit, at least for a little while. My mother …’
I told Vic my parents needed me to work full time at home.
‘Don’t worry about it.’ He grinned at me, Unibrow riding up on his skull. He went to get my time card and began figuring my pay on a pocket calculator.
Emily turned around behind him, smiled at me. Her teeth were very bright. She mouthed, ‘Fuck me.’
‘I hope this isn’t a problem, Mr Vogel.’
‘Hell, negatory. I understand. You say hello to your dad for me.’ He stood and shook my hand. Then he pulled out a cheque book, the cheques decorated with scenes of geese in a swamp at sunrise, and wrote one for me. ‘I rounded it up a buck or two.’ He moved his fist out slowly until it rested on my chin. ‘Take care, James.’
My father and mother sat on the sofa listening to what Emily had told me about having to quit. I said I didn’t know any more about it than that.
They sat there side by side waiting for the rest, but I’d already told them everything.
‘Is that it?’ My father narrowed his eyes.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Not much of a story.’ He looked at his fingernails.
‘No, sir.’
He scratched the back of his neck and sighed. Then he pointed at me and through me and out into the backyard. ‘Paint the garage.’
I sat in my room at the end of the day, hearing a lawnmower buzz grass on a lawn across the street. People flip-flopped down to the beach after getting off work. Sounds of car radios rose into my hearing, were loud and then faded again.
I took the blanket off my bed and pulled it over me where I sat in my chair by the window. It came down to my knees. The only light that reached me was a dark, quiet Hudson Bay green.
For a long time, I sat under the blanket, trying not to think.
Two days later, Emily phoned and said she wanted to talk.
I was standing on a ladder painting the garage when her Camaro pulled into the driveway. Flecks of white paint peppered my hair and my shoulders.
I got in her car and we didn’t speak until we reached the parking lot of the East Bay Plant.
‘Why are we going in the back way?’
The car smelled of burnt marijuana and beer.
‘You’ll see.’ She stopped at the far end of the parking lot, away from the plant.
A crowd had gathered at the main gate. The cutters and the packers and the Cong. I saw Ramsey and McFarlane. They leaned against a truck, sharing a cigarette.
The gate was closed and a sign had been bolted to it. The sign was too far away to make out the words.
‘Dad filed for bankruptcy yesterday.’ Emily opened the car door and stretched her legs. “The feds are looking for him now.’
‘Where is he? And your mother?’ I heard shouting over by the gate.
‘Bahamas, I guess. And the reason they’re all so pissed off over there is because their last pay checks bounced. Yours may have been the last good one Dad ever wrote.’
‘What do the feds want him for?’
‘Oh, illegal employment, embezzlement of funds, income tax evasion. They read me a list over the phone this morning. I said I didn’t know where he was.’
‘Where are you going to go?’ I caught the sound of breaking glass. The Cong had started pelting offices on the second floor with stones from the parking lot.
Emily chewed at her lip as the windows shattered one after the other. ‘I’m going to live with my uncle and aunt in Newport. I don’t know what else to do. I have some money he put in my bank account before he left. I don’t know when they’re coming back.’ She didn’t look sad. Only tired. ‘Just wanted you to know the reason I made you quit. Didn’t want you to think it had anything to do with me. And the thing about going bankrupt is that you can’t tell anyone or the creditors drop down on you like vampires. If I’d told someone and Dad found out, I think he’d have killed me just like he’d have killed anybody else.’
‘They’re going to tear the place down.’
‘I know it, I would too, if I was them. I brought us here to see the show.’
Leaving Galilee, we passed a black and white police car, lights flashing, going in the opposite direction.
Emily dropped me off at the breakwater by Narragansett Beach. It was a moon high tide. Water slapped deep against the stone wall.
I leaned through the open door and kissed her on the cheek. ‘We’ll meet up soon.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s a shame about us.’ Then she put her car in gear and drove away fast down the road to Newport.
For a moment I stood in the road watching her car.
It occurred to me that she was one of the few friends I had, and if we left things the way we’d just left them, I’d probably never see her again.
I sprinted after the black car, felt my breath rush in and out through my clenched teeth.
I had no idea what I’d say to her.
The car slowed briefly. The cat’s eyes of its brake lights flashed red in exhaust fumes as it turned onto the Newport road. Then it picked up speed and was gone long before I reached the corner.
I walked back, sweat sticking my shirt to my chest, and sat on the breakwater, dangling my legs over the stone wall until the water reached my feet.
Then I wandered home and painted the garage until it was too dark to see any more.
Two
My grandfather washed up on a Block Island beach.
This was in the winter of 1959.
Two fishermen found him rolled in seaweed at the high-tide line. His mouth was full of sand and hermit crabs lived in the pockets of his coat. His boat and the rest of his crew completely disappeared.
My grandmother asked that he be laid to rest near where they found him, so he was buried on the cliffs at a place called Mohegan Bluffs. After the funeral, they set a bronze plaque in the ground.
Captain Augustus Weber. 1910–1959.
&n
bsp; F/V Matador left Galilee, RI, Nov. 12.59.
And was never seen again.
Requiescat in Pace.
Sometimes in late autumn, around Indian summer, my mother took the Block Island ferry, she walked out to the bluffs and set flowers on his grave.
My father had been a fisherman since age twelve.
At twenty-four, he bought his own boat.
On his thirtieth birthday, a wave washed him overboard somewhere off Montauk. He drifted for ten hours before another fishing boat picked him up. A shark swam circles around him in the last hour before he was rescued. As a man reached down to pull him from the water, this shark swam from under the boat and butted my father’s chest so hard it broke three ribs. The fish never bit him. People said he had lost his mind by the time they brought him on deck.
When he returned to shore, he promised my mother to give his sons a way out of fishing. All our family had done for generations was run trawlers off the New England coast.
He stayed on as a trawler captain because he couldn’t find a way to make better money than in fishing. Without the money, he figured, he couldn’t keep his promise.
He put my older brother Joseph through college and business school.
The summer after my first year in high school, he sent me to a summer programme at a place called St Regis Prep in New London, where I stayed for three weeks before being sent home on disciplinary action.
I had a recipe for brewing beer from an old cookbook.
I made a mixture according to the instructions and hid the sealed bottles under some floorboards in my room.
A week later, in the middle of the night, the bottles exploded one after the other. They blew the floorboards up and sprayed ugly-smelling fermented yeast all over my bed and the walls and the ceiling.
People told me they could smell it in the dorm across the road.
I realised later that I’d known I would be caught. I knew if I didn’t get caught making the alcohol, then I’d get caught drinking it. And I knew I’d be kicked out.