by Paul Watkins
My father took his hat off and whipped it at the floor.
‘Have you any idea what I’ve been trying to accomplish these last ten years?’ Then he stepped forward and screamed. ‘Have you?’ He stood over me.
I looked at the dirty socks on my feet.
‘Do you have any goddamn idea why I still go out fishing and give all my damn money to schools and let the people on the dock make fun of me and why I wade through those parents on parents’ day who think I’m the janitor come to wipe up their spilled drinks? Any clues? Look up! Stand up!’
I stood and looked at his forehead. I didn’t want to see his eyes. Joseph taught me the trick. A person who’s bellowing at you face to face is trying to beat you down with his eyes but you don’t look at him and he can’t make you. That way you can keep from falling apart the way he wants you to.
‘I’m asking if you know why I still do all that. Do you think I like it? I’m asking you if you think I like it, James.’
‘How can I know?’
‘You’ll know because I’ll tell you. I hate it. Ever since I floated around like a dead man off Martha’s Vineyard waiting for a boat to pick me up I’ve hated it. I’m doing it so you won’t have to. So you can have a halfways decent life making decent money. Now – he pointed at my mother without looking at her – ‘we have made a life for ourselves. But we see where it falls short. We’re making it so your life and Joseph’s life don’t fall short. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?’
‘Understand.’
‘Good. I got nothing more to say. If you want to go out and drown yourself, go do it at the beach so’s we can get to the body before the fish do. So’s we’ll have something to bury. Am I still understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Mother held my shoulder and guided me down into my seat again. ‘We only want for you to be able to spend time with your family when you have one,’ she said. ‘To come home at the end of the day. That’s what a family is. A family is coming home at the end of the day. And a family is not having to worry if a storm blows down from Canada. Please try and understand. Your father and I decided a long time ago that we would change the way our family was living. You know what happened to my father. Don’t you see how that frightens us when we think of you out working on a boat? Why did you go out?’ Her eyebrows were crooked with worry.
I felt sweat across my ribs and between my toes. My mouth tasted like steel wool. ‘If you were so worried about me working on a boat, why did you make me go out with Gunther in the first place?’
Father’s face still twitched with disgust, but he had spent it now. Only the nerves still carried jolts of anger through his skin. ‘I sent you to work with Gunther because I knew he wouldn’t go out if it was stormy. His equipment is good. I know that Gunther only works close in to the beaches. That’s a big difference from forty miles out to sea. All the difference in the world. It’s why we let you keep working for him. Can you honestly tell me you’d sooner work on a dock for the rest of your life instead of being a lawyer?’
Mother squeezed my knee. ‘A lawyer,’ she whispered and smiled, opening her eyes wide. ‘What kind of a life does Gunther have to give you? You know the kind of people who work for him. Lowlifes. Burnouts.’ She messed up my hair and said in a kind voice, ‘We won’t let you end up like them.’
‘I wanted to see for myself. I can choose.’
‘You can.’ Father nodded, chewing the inside of his mouth. ‘But if you choose to be a fisherman, you can do it without my help. You start from scratch.’ He walked into the kitchen.
‘Case closed.’ Mother nodded, smiling and searching for my eyes.
‘I’ll work for Gunther until I go back to school. He’ll give me back my old job. I’ll start tomorrow.’ I could feel myself falling asleep. The clammy touch of sweat drying on my stomach and back. Sound reaching me as if through a long pipe. Words making sense seconds after they were spoken.
Mother smoothed back my hair. ‘Take some time off instead. Take a little rest.’
‘A rest would be nice.’
‘I’ll call Gunther in the morning, then. Tell him you quit.’ Father yelled over the sound of splintering bones.
‘I’m taking a rest. Don’t tell him I quit.’
‘Sounds like you’re quitting to me.’ He stopped the disposal and turned on the tap. He held his head under the bolt of water.
My mother pressed on my knees and got to her feet. ‘It’s just a word.’
‘Don’t tell him I quit.’
My father blinked at me. Water coursed down his cheeks and bare chest. ‘Gunther will know.’
‘Then I’ll start work tomorrow.’
My father shrugged.
‘For Christ’s sake! Will the two of you ever let up?’ My mother raked her fingers down her face.
The next day, Joseph drove home early from work to have a word with me.
He wore his blue plaid suit and yellow tie.
At twenty-six, his hair had already started to fall out.
Sometimes strangers came up to him in bars and said he looked like a used-car dealer, and they were right. For a year now, he’d been a test-drive salesman at a car dealership in Providence. Most of what he earned went toward paying off his debts.
We walked down Narragansett Beach and sat on the breakwater. I hadn’t cried at all since being kicked out of school. But now when I wanted most not to cry, I did.
I put my face in my hands. My breathing shuddered out of me in quiet gasps.
‘Take it easy.’ He slapped my shoulder and looked off down the beach. ‘Dad told me to give you a lecture while he figures out what to do next, but I figure you don’t need that.’
‘I don’t.’ I could barely speak.
‘I suppose you’ll just spend the rest of this summer working for Gunther and then go back to school in the fall. Right?’
‘I guess.’
‘What do you mean “I guess”?’
‘I have bad grades. I’m almost on academic probation already. My last physics exam said “Absurd”.’
‘I had bad grades. I just didn’t punch anybody out. Couldn’t you have brought him down from behind? That way he wouldn’t have seen who you were. I bet everybody in that Executive Committee room was thinking that. This way you’d have saved everyone the trouble of kicking you out.’
‘I didn’t think about it at the time. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have done it that way.’
‘Look, I’m working on getting my own dealership now. In a couple of years I’ll have one. Then when you get out of school, if you want, you can come work for me. Just keep that in the back of your mind. No more of this going out and getting screwed off by a bunch of Portagees.’
‘I want my own boat. To do that, I have to work on one first.’
‘You already did on that Portagee boat. Considering how that went, why are you still thinking about it?’
‘This time I’ll find a decent ship with a decent crew. Remember when we used to talk about running our own boat?’
‘A long time ago.’
‘I still want to. I’m going to try, at least.’
‘Just work for Gunther, will you? Don’t make a fuss.’
‘I will until I can get back out on a trawler.’
‘That’s your business. That’s between you and Dad and God.’ He took a foil packet from his pocket and handed it to me. ‘Here.’
The packet contained a moist towelette. I carefully unfolded it and wiped my face, smelling perfume.
Joseph rolled up his sleeves. ‘There’s plenty of ways to make a decent living that you’re not even thinking about.’
‘I’m not just thinking about the money.’
‘I’ll ignore that. Listen.’ He pressed his hands together. ‘Tell Dad I gave you a hard time about going on the Portagee boat. And next time’ – he took off his suit jacket and scratched at the sweat stains on his chest – ‘next time, don’t let them push you around.’
Four
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It was early in the morning. I opened the front door and breathed in the cool air.
‘I know where you’re going.’ Mother sat at the kitchen table. She held a steaming mug of coffee.
I turned to face her. ‘I’m leaving for Gunther’s.’
‘You’re going to look for work on another trawler. I know you are.’
‘How do you know?’ I thought of Joseph, still asleep in his bed upstairs. I wanted to go up and tip him on to the floor.
‘Is that where you’re going? Tell me the truth.’ She sipped at her coffee. It looked as if her hands were smouldering.
‘It is where I’m going. Yes. How did you know?’
‘Your father said you would.’ She tapped a saccharin pill out of a blue box into her drink and stirred it with her finger.
I put down my backpack and sat down at the table. ‘I want my own boat. It’s what I’ve always wanted. I need the experience. I need to know how things work out there. How things really work on a well-run boat.’ I opened my mouth to say more and she cut me off, holding up her hand for me to be quiet.
‘I know your reasons already, James. At one point or another, I’ve heard them all from your father. I just want you to remember what we told you. Before you go out there again, think of the cost.’
‘What cost?’
‘The cost of your family and maybe the cost of your life. What more costs do I have to tell you about? I’ve already said what I have to say. Maybe if your father was here and not out to sea, he might have something else to tell you, but I don’t.’
I swung the door slowly back and forth, hearing the hinges creak.
‘When did Dad tell you he thought I’d go out again?’
‘Same day you came back from that first trip. He said you’d probably have to go see for yourself and you’d probably get yourself killed and that he would at least be able to fall asleep with a clear conscience at night, knowing that he did his best. But what I want to know’ – she blinked through the steam from her coffee – ‘what I want to know is: where does that leave me?’ She looked down at the table, then picked at one of the buttons on her nightdress.
With that movement, I knew she was going to cry.
She raised her head. ‘If you weren’t so selfish, you’d see we only want the best for you. We thought this out when you were still pissing in your pants, young man. If you were more like Joseph, you wouldn’t be so selfish.’
‘Joseph is the best reason I have for going out.’
‘When your father said he wouldn’t help you, he meant it. I want you to know that. I’ll hold him to it.’ Her face was dirty with tears.
Hot day coming.
Only the coffee shops were open on Severn Street.
Shop owners swept the pavement in front of their stores. They sprayed water on the windows with green hoses and wrote new lists on menu boards.
I walked in the road on the fat cobblestones. Hot day coming.
Jib lines of sailboats rattled against their masts in the harbour.
I carried my fishing gear, oilers, boots and knife in a bundle tied with orange twine, in case someone offered me a job right away.
Sabatini had his barrels up early. Two fifty-gallon drums linked by a chain and a sign hanging from the middle that said ‘No Parking. Violators Will Be Toad.’ If he didn’t set the barrels out, tourists took all his parking space. Some slotted their cars in next to the loading ramp so his refrigeration trucks couldn’t pull up.
People at Gunther’s said that Sabatini sometimes fired all his dock boys in a single breath if one of them forgot the barrels. We used to watch Sabatini stamping across his dock, waving his arms up and down like a man trying to save himself from drowning.
Kelley once told me that Sabatini ate Alka Seltzer tablets. He ate them without dissolving the tablets in water and his cheeks puffed up with the foam.
A woman with a food truck had parked on the loading ramp. She moved from one dock to the other, up and down Severn Street all day selling coffee and doughnuts.
A line of dock boys and trawlermen stood next to the truck. The dock boys wore aprons and rubber sleeve-protectors. The fishermen wore rusty jeans and leather vests. Some had long hair tied in a ponytail. Their arms were maps of tattoos.
When the dock boys had what they wanted, they walked back into Sabatini’s fish house and turned on the radio, which played through loudspeakers bolted on girders in the roof, same as at Gunther’s. It made you deaf if you stayed in the fish house all day. When they turned the radio off at night, the speakers still hissed like a seashell held against the ear.
The trawlermen went back to their spot on the edge of the wharf, legs dangling down over the harbour. They were waiting for their captains to arrive, so they could get to the work of repairing scallop dredges or twining ripped nets before heading out to sea again.
I walked through the fish house, floor toe-deep in water from the hoses and the conveyer belts already working. Barrels of fish swung on ropes up from the decks of trawlers to the sorting tables and scales. Dock boys punched the slimy ice down through gratings on the tables and threw away fish too small or gone rotten.
One dock boy told me a scallop dragger called Grey Ghost was looking for a crewman.
The boat was maybe a hundred feet long, painted white with a dark grey strip running the length of its hull.
Nobody on board. Engine off.
I sat on a pile of old fishnet, waiting to see if anyone would show, and thinking about what my mother had said when I left the house that morning.
I wondered if things were ruined at home. A heaviness rested in my guts. I wondered if my father would refuse to pay for any more school if I decided to go back. I wondered what they said when I was gone.
Light broke off the water and stabbed at my eyes. It flickered up between the boards of Sabatini’s dock.
I took a pocket whetstone from my bundle of clothes and spat on it. I began to sharpen the blade of my fish knife.
Kelley had said that sometimes a captain would ask to see a new man’s fish knife and if it was blunt, he’d know the man didn’t take care of his gear and wouldn’t give him the job.
Carefully I moved the blade along the whetstone, then turned the handle and sharpened the other side, seeing a bright silver of sharpness appearing on the edge. I wiped the grey paste of stone grit onto my jeans.
By ten o’clock, it looked as if the whole crew had arrived.
I didn’t raise my head as they walked past me. I pretended to mind my own business and hunted for something in my pack, but really I was counting them. I strained my eyes to watch their work boots thumping across the dock and jumping down onto the rusted deck of the Grey Ghost.
The captain stood on the bow eating a hamburger for breakfast. His crew replaced the scallop dredges’ bags by joining iron rings together with links. They used a big clamp for squeezing the links shut. Already they were sweating, and their shirts lay draped over loose cables that hung above the deck.
Now and then one of them walked to a space at the stern, a U-shaped cut in the back of the boat, and pissed into the bay. The space was there on most large trawlers, used to drag the net through when a boat was rigged for fishing instead of scalloping.
I hadn’t moved from my place on the dock, because I needed to see why they had a full crew now. The dock boy told me they were running a man short. I waited for the best time to approach the captain, when instinct said to move in.
If a new man without experience had found the captain last night up at Mary’s bar and asked for work, then I’d still have a chance of getting a job if the new man didn’t pull his weight.
But if it was one of the captain’s old friends, or a friend of a crewman who knew his business, then I’d only be making a fool of myself by asking for work.
I’d have to take the bus home again, eyes to the floor and with no strength left in me. It would be just like all the other times I’d come home from Sabatini’s with no job. When that
happened, it took all the will I had left just to hold the hand grip above the seat in front, as if even a gust of air would blow me out the window.
In the days when Joseph had his Rolomatic suggestion board on the basement door, he used to talk about a rule of his, that it didn’t matter what you did as long as you got what you wanted and kept it. He drove to the chain stores each day with that in his head. Going to war in his VW bug.
I had left myself no choice but to think the same way. I refused to sit in my room again with a blanket over my head, trying to make myself empty, to turn off the energy I had stockpiled for use on the sea, and not let it rip me inside out like a piece of ripe fruit.
I would not go home on the bus.
I would not leave the dock until I had a job.
There was a new man on the boat. Easy to tell.
He sat on the hatch of the lazarette, a storage compartment at the stern, and he sharpened knives.
Every couple of minutes, he set the knife and the sharpening stone down on the deck and walked over to stare at the other crewmen, trying to figure out what they were doing.
Then one of the regulars would shove him out of the way or ask him what his problem was, and he’d go back to work.
‘I already got me a man.’ The captain sat on a coil of rope at the bow. A pigmeat roll of gut hung from under his shirt. He licked ketchup off the hamburger wrapper. ‘Full crew.’
‘Maybe you could put me to work and if you thought I was better, you could let me take his place.’
‘I don’t pay by the hour.’
‘I know. Just put me to work. If you don’t want me, don’t pay me.’
‘You say you been fishing before.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘No need for calling me that.’
‘I fished on the Ocean Horse. Before that, I worked the trap boats over at Gunther’s.’
‘Usually if I find a man who worked the Ocean Horse, I make a point of not giving him a job.’