She turned. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say something useful.”
She curled her lip, maybe trying to decide whether to walk off without me or not. She could be touchy that way those days.
Instead, she said, “Well, where did you find it?”
“In the bay, fifty yards offshore in about two feet of water.”
“And it was a block?”
“My dad calls it an ‘ingot.’”
“Did it have any writing?”
“We saw some kind of stamp but couldn’t make it out.”
“Ah,” Melanie said. “So it’s cursed pirate treasure.”
See? Once you got her going, she could be cool.
“Lead isn’t treasure,” I pointed out.
“Sure it is, for pirates. What do you think all those cannonballs were made of? Or the bullets in their guns? Old Gasparilla was on the run in the bay from the Spanish—that’s the writing—and he had to drop cargo to escape. Before he did, he cursed it.”
Melanie had a way of explaining the ridiculous so that it sounded like reason.
“How does that help us?” I asked.
“It helps a lot,” Melanie replied. “It came from the sea, so it has to go back to the sea.”
It wouldn’t be easy. We were five years too young to drive a car out to Palmetto Bay, and even if we did, the place where we’d found the lead was lined with dense mangroves. My dad had a 10’ aluminum SeaKing that could get us out there from our dock, but only he was allowed to use it.
We might not have to go out all that way, though.
“If the water’s deep enough, it wouldn’t matter where we dropped the Lincoln, would it?”
A few months earlier, I’d seen huge cranes dredging about a hundred feet from the bridge, scooping out silt and mussel shells for some repairs to the pilings. We couldn’t throw it that far, but with the help of a hijacked boat…
“I guess it wouldn’t,” Melanie agreed.
So that was it. We would drop the Leaning Lincoln into the deepest abyss we could find in our little town, just on the other side of the Old Beach Road bridge and within sight of a well-known local seafood restaurant called the Flying Sailfish. We’d borrow my father’s boat to get there.
“Great,” she said. “Good luck.”
“You’re coming with me.”
She’d been circling the whole Valley Girl thing the last few months, thanks to MTV. She said, “As if. I’m not going to let anybody see me from that restaurant.”
“It’s a bunch of old people. For all they know, you’d be sunning yourself.”
A chance to look glamorous, even to the elderly, wasn’t something she could pass up.
I had to wait until ten in the morning for my father to leave before borrowing his boat. First, he had to finish his morning orange juice with a splash of vodka, then shower and shave, then get dressed, then fiddle around with something on the hot water heater, and then check the oil in the Volkswagen.
Who was running the store those days, I had no idea. Mom had gotten a job as a doctor’s office manager so it wasn’t her. For all I knew, he opened and closed whenever he felt like it.
When he finally left, I called Melanie to come over. She was wearing shorts over a one-piece bathing suit, plus her mother’s huge sun hat. She smeared tanning lotion on her arms while I climbed into the boat in my peeling iron-on Empire Strikes Back t-shirt. Then she gingerly extended her right foot before taking the center seat.
If there was any time for turning back, for saving myself another of my father’s tooth-loosening punches to the face, this was it. But there was no way I could keep it, and there was no way I could stick someone else with it. The punches were mine to take.
I lowered the 20 horsepower Evinrude so its propeller entered the water. It thunked against the plywood my father had bolted to the back to reinforce it. I pulled out the choke and tugged the rope. I pushed it in about half way and tugged again, but nothing happened. I pushed in the choke and tried again. I put my foot on the gunwale and yanked with all my strength, rocking the SeaKing so hard that it crashed against the sea wall and almost threw us out in the creek.
My old man had adjusted that motor until it was perfect. Now it wouldn’t start at all.
Then I remembered the Leaning Lincoln under my seat. I took the coffee can out and gave it to Melanie. She handled it with her towel.
“Put that up in the bow,” I said.
The engine then started on the first pull, and I steered us out into the creek. Melanie lounged back in her seat like the lady from The African Queen.
Coquina Creek, named for the old Indian mounds along its sides, was wide and shallow near our part, maybe a hundred yards across. We chugged past the little waterfront houses, and the huge tangles of mangrove roots took over from the seawall when we got closer to the bridge. The creek looked wilder there, more adventurous, like an island in a pirate movie.
I idled the motor and we drifted under the Old Beach Road bridge. A couple of cars thump-thumped over as we did, and I nudged one of the pylons so we wouldn’t hit it. We passed the deep sandy scars of the cranes, and then the current seemed to pick up.
Above us to my left, the brunch crowd at the Flying Sailfish was lining up for the buffet. A few peered through the windows at us.
“Take the helm,” I said to Melanie. She climbed back smiling, brushed the hair from her eyes, and clutched the handle like someone bracing for a typhoon.
I stepped up to the bow, took out the coffee can, and opened the top. I peeled away the paper towels and removed the Leaning Lincoln. In my imagination, it weighed ten pounds and let out a subsonic hum I could feel in my bones.
I held it in my fist above the water.
“Say something,” Melanie yelled over the engine noise.
“Okay,” I said, taking a breath. “I consign thee to the—”
The boat surged forward with a roar of the Evinrude. I fell back against the gunwale, still clutching the Lincoln. I tottered for a moment, my arms outstretched, and then I fell headfirst into the water.
Even in Florida, even in summer, that water was cold. Or maybe it was the shock that took the air from my lungs. I lost my ability to breathe, not to mention swim, and I felt myself sinking.
Melanie claimed for years afterward that she hadn’t turned the throttle. The motor went by itself, she said. If it was late and she was tired, she’d admit it could have been a muscle spasm. If it was later and she was tipsy, she’d say she kind of blacked out for a second and didn’t even remember. Like she’d been possessed.
As I let myself sink, the boat zoomed off in a wide arc. I could hear the purr of the engine even under water, something comforting. But then came a muffled squeal and that jarred me into treading water again.
With my eyes barely above the surface, I could see the boat had hit something big. The squeal continued now, and something sharp peeled away an inch-wide tendril of the aluminum hull like a pull top from my father’s beer cans. Water gushed in.
I knew what she’d hit. The cranes had dredged a channel in the middle, all right, but they’d piled the razor-sharp mussel shells closer to the restaurant where boats seldom went. Maybe they planned to come get them, or maybe not.
Melanie was shrieking now, which to be fair is what I’d be doing too. I swam over, but the boat was filling up fast. The bow had dipped below the waterline and the stern was swinging over the mussel shells.
My legs scraped against them and the brackish water felt like acid flowing in the cuts. I tried not to scream as I grabbed for Melanie. I was feeling like a real hero, saving the girl with everybody watching.
Then the boat rolled over and knocked me in the head. I dipped below the surface again, and Melanie had to tow me to shore.
God knows what I looked like, blood streaming down my face, to the two dozen white-capped heads watching us from the windows of the Flying Sailfish. Melanie told me later that I held up one hand to say
it was all right.
As the boat sank, the motor dragged along the shells, spraying fragments everywhere. It snapped the reinforcing plywood transom, revealing the original name of the boat had been Elizabeth. I gave a limp salute as it went under.
By then, the World War II veterans among the brunch crowd had run down to the shore to throw the decorative life preservers from the restaurant’s walls out to us. Melanie grabbed one even though it was made of heavy wood, and we kicked as they pulled us in.
I felt something in my palm and looked down to see I still had the Leaning Lincoln. In all that, I hadn’t let go. It hadn’t let me let go.
Waitresses brought dishtowels to dry us off while the manager called our parents. Everybody knew I was the bookstore owner’s son so there was no hope of them calling Mom instead. All I could do was wait for him to come.
Melanie’s mother pulled up in their Datsun first and willed her daughter inside with a terrifying glare.
I waved to say, “See you later!” but neither waved back.
Eventually, a sputtering Volkswagen on the road above signaled my reckoning. I stepped away from the other people in case my father decided to run me over.
He didn’t. He stopped, climbed out, and peered at me. In certain moments, among certain watching eyes, my father could be eerily calm and focused. A man who would give you a smack across the chops for not blowing your nose could gaze contemplatively at his drenched and bloody son.
“You okay?” he said.
“Yeah,” I replied. “The boat—”
He opened the passenger door and waited for me to climb inside. He then approached a waitress with his wallet open.
“How much do I owe you for those towels?”
She shook her head and he leaned in for a smarmy wink.
Before he could climb into the car himself, though, a man came up and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Sir?” my father said.
“Where’d you get a boat like that oldie?”
“Want ads,” he replied, getting into the seat.
“You sure?” the man asked.
My father put the key in the ignition. “Yeah.”
“Because, heh,” the man said, rubbing the back of his own neck, “I’m missing a boat just like it. Lost her a few months ago when I was out of town. Named her Elizabeth. Thought the storm broke her free from the dock.”
I could imagine the boat drifting, drifting, thumping against our own dock with a broken rope. I could also imagine my father not checking the fingernails of an opportunity.
“Huh,” my father said, snapping the Beetle into reverse. “Sorry I can’t help you, buddy.”
My concussion saved me a beating from my father; the last thing he needed was a second set of hospital bills. Mostly he yelled. About responsibility. About sneaking around. About the sanctity of people’s property.
I was grounded of course, not that I felt much like going outside with my head hurting like it did. My books and figures got taken away, too, all but the Leaning Lincoln. I was supposed to sit in my room and contemplate my sins, I guess.
My dad had a lot to contemplate, too. A few days after the voyage, a letter arrived via certified mail from the man who’d owned the boat: he was a lawyer, naturally, asking politely for my father to pay for it. My father knew those letters always started politely but never ended that way.
Dad was the kind of man who borrowed a Cadillac to drive to Rotary meetings, who’d overextended to buy a small house to say it was “on the water.” He didn’t care as much about losing money as he did about losing its appearance.
“Having a million dollars isn’t success,” he used to say. “Being trusted to borrow a million dollars is.”
If he’d ever had that trust, he’d lost it now. Bad enough the town banker knew he’d missed loan payments. Bad enough the lady at the electric company knew he’d charmed her into letting the bill slide a month or two. But to be a thief was too much. Though no one closed the door to him at the Rotary, fewer came to shake his hand. And that was worse.
Mom worked later and later, and though she wanted me to rejoin the Boy Scouts or play some sport, my father insisted I stay with him. Mostly, we would work on one of his crazy projects—trying to splice the neighbor’s cable, running pipes for a well—and then he’d make me cook a “frontier” dinner of mushy spaghetti or burnt hamburgers. We’d eat in lawn chairs while he held forth. Big corporations were pushing out the little guys. There were too many spinner racks of paperbacks in the grocery store. The Good Ol’ Boys in Florida wouldn’t buy from a New Yorker. The loan officer wanted to sleep with Mom.
One of those nights, my dad was flying—it had been a bad day thanks to a foreclosure notice served in front of customers. We were eating quietly from camping bowls when Henry arrived. I was relieved to see him lumbering across our yard toward the dock, but the closer he got, the more frightened I became.
His eyes had sunken even more into his skull and the shadows around them had gone gray—the gray of lead, I imagined. His hair, usually slick and black against his head, had lost its color; he’d aged twenty years in weeks. Even his clumsy and irregular gait was now close to a stagger.
“Jesus, Henry,” my father said, turning around. “What the fuck happened to you?”
Henry stood a moment in our yard, staring over our heads at the setting sun. Water clopped against the seawall and he closed his eyes as though to listen.
“Sit down, for Christ’s sake,” my old man said, motioning me out of my chair.
I was happy to oblige, and I even reached to help. Henry smiled weakly at me and let me guide him to the chair.
“You sick or something?”
I saw Henry’s fingers curl around the aluminum armrest. They were smudged, not like my father’s with nicotine but gray. His sweat even smelled metallic. He seemed to creak and I wasn’t sure if it was his joints or the chair’s.
I leaned in to tell him to get rid of the lead, that it was cursed or poisonous or radioactive or something, but he spoke before I could.
“I’ve felt better,” Henry said.
My father peeled open an Old Milwaukee for him. Henry lifted it for a sip. After he’d swallowed, he reached into the front pocket of his jumpsuit and gave my father a folded yellow piece of paper.
My father opened it and held it far from his face because he’d refused to believe his eyesight was failing.
“You got evicted?” he squeaked. “From your own fucking house? How does that happen?”
“It’s not my house,” Henry said, simply. “It never was, according to Ben’s lawyer.” Ben was his brother, the one fighting him for their mother’s estate. “I’ve been squatting, they say.”
Good, I thought. Now he’ll get away from that shed and all the lead inside.
“That’s bullshit. Come stay with us.”
Henry shook his head. “I’ve got a line on a night auditor job at the Motel 8. They might let me take a room for a few weeks.”
“What did Matthews say?”
Matthews was Henry’s lawyer.
“He said there isn’t much to do until the mediation. That could be months. Nobody but me is in a hurry.”
Neither noticed I was pretending to read Chariots of the Gods by the dying light. Books have a way of making you invisible.
“I don’t know why I even want that house,” Henry said. “I don’t belong here.”
“In Florida?” My dad took a gulp of beer. “You and me both, pal. Nothing but old farts and rednecks living on a sandbar.”
“No,” Henry said slowly. “I mean, I don’t belong anywhere. Not now, anyway.”
For someone who owned a bookstore, my old man wasn’t exactly glowing with imagination. To him, you were where you were and there wasn’t anything to do about it. But I understood what Henry was talking about: I’d too felt disappointed that books and life were so different and wondered which was wrong. Sometimes I still do.
“There’s nothing for me here,�
�� he said. “There’s too much getting along.”
“Amen, brother.” My father crinkled the empty can in his fist and dropped it to the deck with a thunk. “Civilization is overrated, as folks will discover when the Russians come knocking.”
Maybe he did have an imagination.
My dad then clapped Henry on the back. “Let me show you something I got. It’ll cheer you up.”
Henry didn’t look like he wanted cheering up, but my dad went inside and came out again holding a rifle against his side like that picture of Lee Harvey Oswald.
He fiddled with it dramatically as he always did, slapping in an empty magazine, cocking it, dry firing it. I ducked away each time the barrel swung in my direction. This was a man, after all, who’d once put a .38 bullet into our dining room table while I was sitting at it.
“Chinese surplus Norinco SKS,” he said, holding it out. “All she needs is a guy good with metal to get ‘er full auto.”
Henry took it from him wordlessly. He checked the chamber and removed the magazine before squinting down the sights at a clump of mangrove in the creek.
“I can do that,” said Henry.
My father sighed. “Too bad a bunch of psychos keep guys like us from having the tools we need.”
Henry didn’t reply.
“Guns are wasted on those nutjobs shooting up a post office or a fucking McDonalds when there’s a whole world of assholes who really need it.”
“Yeah,” Henry said.
“Like that crooked lawyer. Whose side is he on? You’d sure find out with a barrel pointing in his face.”
Henry scared me then, staring out at the water, not saying something reasonable. A chunk of driftwood had caught on the dock pilings and made a soft slurping sound.
“And that fucking banker taking my store.” Dad took the SKS and aimed it out across the creek. “Pop, pop, pop!”
Henry didn’t say anything.
“You don’t have to get all the assholes. God knows there aren’t enough bullets in the world. But get a few and scare the rest, right?”
“You’d end up in jail, though,” Henry said. “You wouldn’t be able to take care of your family.”
Acres of Perhaps Page 6