by Mark Richard
BUT THEN YOU GET THE CALL. David and your other best friend, Steve, are camped in a World War II Army tent pitched in a five-dollar-a-night campground on Roanoke Island. Bug-bit, down to their last twenty, living on peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches, sleeping in the sweltering tent at night stitched up against the black swarms of tiger mosquitoes, bruising each other with sleeping-bag punches thrown in the dark over snoring. Every day they go down to Wanchese to get on a scallop boat, having heard you could make as much money in one week on a scallop boat as you could all summer in the paper mill. And they had believed it. When they discover the depth of the deception, they call you collect, them snickering, broke, bug-eaten, and wild-eyed hungry beneath the campground pay-phone streetlight, and they sell you the same story, and you believe it.
No one will lead you down a slippery path faster than your best friends. They know how much you hate the idea of working graveyard shifts in the paper mill, where your fathers are white-collar management, and where the blue-collar labor enjoys assigning college boys home for the summer double shifts unloading pulpwood off river barges, breaking up logjams on the conveyors with long-handled picks more effectively used to fend off the thigh-sized water moccasins that came slithering along with the cargo.
So you drive down to Roanoke Island, stopping for gas at the country store where a man kept a bear in a cage out back. One summer, with a bladder full of eighty-nine-cents-a-six-pack A&P beer, you’d stumbled behind the store after finding the men’s room occupied and had a pretty good torrent going into a stand of bamboo when the bear came charging within inches of you, the cage bars hidden in the thicker stalks of cane. When your friends in the car wondered what had taken you so long and why you had pissed all over your pants and shoes, you just shook your head and told them to drive.
Currituck County, your last step before crossing the sound on into Dare County, is still full of black bears, they say, especially up and down the Alligator River. You know a man who one night set out to kill the bear that was destroying his vineyard, and as in a fable he fell asleep around midnight with his shotgun across his lap. He woke up hearing grunting and thrashing paws ripping clusters of grapes, and he smelled the smell of bear, strong, he said. He stood up, and the bears stood up, one by one around him, five of them, checking out the interloper. Later you tasted the man’s wine, and he was right: nothing to kill a bear over.
You have about two hundred dollars when you find your best friends in their campground, and they take the money and buy some Rebel Yell bourbon and a cheap motel room. The next morning you use what is left to rent a Nags Head beach cottage that the week before had been scheduled for bulldozing. The two hundred dollars isn’t really yours to spend; you were supposed to have given it to the lady in whose basement you’d been living in Virginia Beach, but while she had been away, you let some surfer friends and their girlfriends stay in the house, and some things had gotten messed up, so you had left without saying goodbye.
Here is how the Wanchese scallop boats assemble their crews. You work for free getting the trawler ready to go fishing, changing over gear, painting, rerigging, building dredges, and then after the tons of ice are shoveled into the hold, the captain says, You, you, and you. If you’ve worked hard, maybe you and about ten other guys will get on. This doesn’t sound like a good idea, but by this time all the paper-mill jobs had been filled. What seemed more sensible was to approach a man who had caught you all asleep in some cottages you had broken into the previous spring in Kill Devil Hills and ask him for a job. Instead of calling the police, he had put you to work opening his restaurant, painting, scraping oven grease, nailing in new screens, and shoveling tons of sand out of the parking lot. He didn’t pay you but said you had done a good job. This idea is vetoed by your friends. Besides, they say, remember on the last day everyone was working for the man and you realized it was Easter Sunday and excused yourself and hitchhiked to church? He’s not going to hire you, they say, he thinks you’re some kind of weirdo. Okay, you say.
So you start working on the docks for free, and pretty soon you’re down to peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches. You all get on the phone and call another friend of yours collect and tell him about all the money you can make working on a scallop boat in one week, and a couple of days later Ricky arrives. Ricky has some money his aunt had given him, so you all take that and buy some Rebel Yell bourbon and set up the tent behind your cottage and then light it on fire. Later that night you take the charred wooden tent poles and beat one another with them, yelling, Kung Fu! accidentally knocking Ricky unconscious. You drag him into a spare room and feed a lawn sprinkler from a realty office next door in through the window and turn it on full blast so that Ricky can wake up.
Finally, the most notoriously violent Wanchese captain of all, with a single name known from Mexico to Rhode Island, a large burly man with an enormous black beard that creeps all the way up to his shocking blue eyes, taps two of you to join his crew. You and Ricky go.
It was either that trip or the next that you go to your first and only whorehouse. The captain and the cook wanted to go, everybody else wanted to go to the discos near the docks in Cape May. Okay, you’ll go to the whorehouse, you thinking it’ll be like in the movie Paint Your Wagon with Jean Seberg and girls in garters and bustiers. Your captain steals a fish truck, and you drive down and past the smell of rotting fish and pull in to a trailer park. The girls are ugly and nice. One of them takes your captain into the way back of the trailer, and other girls want to know which of the girls in the kitchen do you want to have a “date” with? You like the one shuffling cards at the kitchenette table, she could almost be the sister of the girl you starred with in The Skin of Our Teeth, but instead you ask, what are y’all playing? Spades. So for a few hours you and she and two other girls play spades and drink vodka and smoke some roaches from the ashtray and listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd and have a party. The big girl who took your captain comes out and says, Your captain is tired.
Nobody else comes to the trailer that night, and later you and the girls all pass out just like normal people. At dawn some guy, maybe their manager or pimp, comes and shakes you where you’re sleeping on the couch. He’s an older guy, maybe even thirty. He wants to know what you’re doing there, and one of the girls who passed out on the recliner wakes up cranky and says to leave you alone, you’re not a john, and your captain comes out just then like a big bear growling out of hibernation, and the pimp backs off, and when you and your captain get into the fish truck, you realize you could have driven yourself back that night after all, that there is just a screwdriver jammed into the ignition.
DURING WORLD WAR II, German U-boats sleeked up and down the Outer Banks, unchallenged in the early days, sometimes sinking ships at the rate of one a day—oily smoke on the horizon and the bodies of seamen washing up onto the beaches to be found by schoolchildren. From the decks of the scallop boats, you often dredge up the cargo Churchill fretted after. On one trip you and your crewmates pull up hundreds of helmets, the webbing rotted out, and you all wear them until one comes up with the top part of a skull affixed to the inside, and everyone heaves them overboard. The crew looks for old torpedoes in the nets and dredges as they are swung aboard. People were still talking about the live torpedo that slid out of the scallop boat Snoopy’s nets, killing eight of the twelve crew members aboard. Once, miles over the horizon from shore, your trawler pulls up several ossified motorcycles that seem chiseled out of cheap concrete.
As a cub reporter in Virginia Beach, you had interviewed the Navy diver who explored the first U-boat sunk in U.S. waters in the war, U-85, just off Bodie Light. It had been a messy kill. An old World War I destroyer, pressed into patroling the coast, caught the sub on the surface one night trying to put men ashore, or so the diver believed. The destroyer punched holes in the U-boat’s conning tower with its three-inch gun, then raked its deck with machine-gun fire. No one is certain if the U-boat was submerging or sinking stem first into the April waters. German sailor
s abandoned ship and began calling for help. Fearing a trap and perhaps feeling a rage, the destroyer depth-charged everything, settling the U-boat in a hundred feet of icy water, its dead blue crew retrieved, all internally ruptured.
The old Navy diver tells you that on his first daylight descent to the U-boat the first thing he saw, painted on the conning tower, was a wild boar with a red rose in its mouth. He said the way the sun struck it, it was a beautiful sight underwater that he would never forget. In the sub’s compartments he found bodies and thousands of U.S. dollars floating around like large confetti. Of the twenty-nine bodies recovered, four were in civilian clothes, and souvenir hunters aboard the recovery vessel found American Social Security cards and driver’s licenses in the pockets. The U-boat crew members were secretly buried in their underwear in numbered graves in the National Cemetery just north in Hampton, Virginia. To the south, on Ocracoke Island, four British sailors, U-boat victims, are buried in a small cemetery where every year a fresh Union Jack arrives punctually from the Queen.
HUNDREDS OF SHIPWRECKS LITTER the ocean floor off the Outer Banks, most stranded and beaten to pieces on Diamond Shoals off Cape Hatteras, where the cold Labrador Current collides with the warm waters of the Gulf Stream on their way to take the chill off the Swedish reindeer cowboy’s winter above the Arctic Circle.
From the dredgings, you collect smooth river-stone ballast, imagining the English streams from which it had originated, until there was just too much of it and you toss it over the side. The smaller items are more interesting, the handmade bottles and the clay trading pipes, some long-stemmed sorts remarkably intact and functional off-watch, in the forepeak packed to the brim with Roanoke Island homegrown. Foolishly, you let the other winch man on your watch use your best pipe once. A sudden turn in the rudder sent the holder pitching over; the pipe fell to the floor and shattered; your curse at losing the pipe was matched by the curse coming from the bunk below—he hadn’t gotten his hit yet.
YOUR FATHER TRIES TO FIND YOU in your condemned cottage a couple of times when you’re out at sea. Once, he finds Ricky, lounging in the living room, covered in flies and reading Edgar Allan Poe, bong nearby, Ricky oblivious to the incessant buzzing and crawling. A three-foot lobster that had come up in your nets was rotting under the front porch. Your father never tells you he’d been there, had seen the way you were living. He told Ricky to tell you that he dropped by, but Ricky “forgot.”
Here is a Ricky Illustration. One night, getting ready to go to the dance pavilion, you and your best friends accidentally take some pills you have found and wake up several hours later when Ricky comes in and announces, Hey, somebody stole my car! Somebody stole your car? Yeah, he says, kind of crazy-eyed, that guy right over there! He points to a little stilted cottage diagonally across the beach road where a friendly dope dealer lives. You and your buddies kick open the dope dealer’s door and put him by the throat against the wall. Where’s Ricky’s car? you all demand. When he can take a breath, the dope dealer says just a little while earlier he had picked up Ricky, who was walking along the side of the road from the dance pavilion. Evidently, Ricky had experienced another of his infamous blackouts at the dance pavilion, wandered out the beach exit instead of the road entrance, and, unable to find his car in the wrong parking lot, was walking up and down the beach road disoriented until the dope dealer recognized him and offered Ricky, a good customer, a ride home. Is that true? you all demand. The dope dealer pointed out that if he’d stolen Ricky’s car, why isn’t it parked under his cottage? In fact, the dope dealer was pretty sure the car is still in the parking lot of the dance pavilion. Turning to Ricky for his side of the story Ricky suddenly stares down at his bare feet and exclaims, pointing, Hey, somebody stole my shoes!
It is probably a good thing that Ricky returns to college at the end of the summer to complete his business degree and become a captain of industry. Everyone seems to be returning to school except you and Steve. You’ve made a lot of money and have spent every penny. There is no college money—a moot point, since your college has invited you not to return that semester. The first mate on the scallop trawler you crewed on is a guy named Art. He and his best friend are looking for an extra hand to take an old wooden subchaser down the Intracoastal that fall, en route to the Caribbean. You have just read Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-two in the Shade and you want to see the Florida Keys. You drive home to sell it to your father as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cruise the Caribbean, much like the time he had spent smoke-jumping in Idaho. Your father listens patiently, sipping from his green goldfish bowl of ice and Rebel Yell bourbon. Finally, he says he will make a deal with you; he will give you his blessing if you promise to finish college the next year, on the condition that he will no longer have to foot any part of your tuition. You jump at the bargain. Driving down to Nags Head later, you catch the hook in your father’s proposition. You are still smarting from your mother’s parting comment to you. When she had finished your summer’s worth of laundry, boiled and line-dried, especially the sheets and trousers, she’d said to you, We don’t live like this.
GOD TURNS US OVER to what we worship. In the fall, on the Outer Banks, the early afternoon gathering gloom over the ocean in the east is a peculiar darkness, a kind of darkness that can cast your mind into a wonderful place to express all sorts of things like ingratitude to God, the failing light perfect for people prone to such things to commit their sins. Some bad things happen between you and Steve that fall, mainly having to do with a seventeen-year-old girl. After Labor Day, the people who can leave the Outer Banks do. The wrecks remain. There are a lot of burglaries in the cottages around you, and people should suspect you but don’t. A girl punches out all the windows in the nearby realty office one night after she drinks a quart of vodka alone. The glass opens her arms from her wrists to her elbows, and the doctors said the only thing holding the flesh together was all the bracelets she liked to wear. She is almost bled out, sitting in the dark in her rocking chair, when you find her. She has called out weakly to you in greeting as you just happen to walk by from a depressing evening at the nearly empty dance pavilion. You could smell all the blood. She had been a popular girl all summer, and her parents come and get her and take her away to a mental hospital.
Steve goes out on steel hulls, and you take a couple of trips on the wooden shrimp boats down in Core Sound. You raft alongside a local boat one night, a real horn-callused barefoot fisherman from Wanchese. He’s from the old school of Wanchese fishermen; if you work on their boats, you’ll be singing hymns and slinging fish. His wife is with him, two children, a boy and a girl, all barefoot and sunbaked, all old with a kind of knowledge you do not possess. They invite you for supper to their galley table overflowing with cucumbers, fish, fresh biscuits, tomatoes, okra, corn, and the fisherman thanks God for the plentiful harvest, the abundance of the water, the blessings of his wife and children, for the fellowship with you. There’s a Bible in the wheelhouse for the time between hauling in the nets.
Later that night you have the wheel of the little shrimper, an old one, wheelhouse on the stern. The night is moonless and cloudless under a canopy of stars so dense it makes you claustrophobic, and it’s hard to breathe. You’re homesick and unwilling to go home; undone by a young girl and beyond broke, you feel bankrupt. The last time you were in the hospital a candy striper kept coming by, a girl probably your age, and you kept wondering why she kept coming around, you weren’t encouraging her, and she didn’t seem to know why she kept coming around either, but after a while you looked forward to her visits, and on the last day before you went home, she brought you a little blue palm-sized New Testament and you didn’t think she was that kind of girl, and maybe she didn’t either, because she says, handing it to you, that she felt led to give this to you, and she had written some words in the front cover that you have to this day, and some of the words say, A friend of mine once said that there were two things in life that last and that is man’s soul and God’s word. So I thou
ght I’d give you God’s word so that you may grow in Him and be whole. The night at the wheel of the shrimper you know you are steering into a dark that will stay dark for a long time.
ON YOUR LAST TRIP NORTH the captain and the mate shoot up vodka once they finish off the heroin they’ve brought. A guy tries to knock you overboard one night after arguing about a rain hat. Your trawler is boarded by the Coast Guard at gunpoint and forced into Cape May, where everyone decides to go out on the town, everyone putting on his best wear: black pants, black T-shirts with motorcycle logos and skulls, wallets chained to belts, hobnailed boots. The crew popping pills and snapping open dangerous-looking knives—bucks, martial arts, and the first stiletto you have ever seen and which you subsequently steal. About ten of you walk the bad streets adjacent to the docks at Cape May, a scythe up the street of black and trouble, except for the one element that is you: slicked-back long greasy hair, scraggly beard, sure, but wearing the only clean clothes you could find in the bottom of your duffel, the irrelevant college clothes—the pristine white corduroy slacks, baggy with the weight you’ve shed on deck, and the baby blue Izod alligator shirt, tight with new muscle, purple variety-store flip-flops clopping around your feet. And still you swagger with the rest of them, looking exactly like what you are, some assholish seafaring preppy impostor.