Down near the water was a large kid. He got in one of the sunken boats and started bailing with a cutout Clorox-bottle scoop tied to his wrist.
"Do we rent those boats to customers?"
She had arranged the darts into a neat parallel arsenal on the bar and lit a cigarette and sat up close on the other side on a stool. She put her beer on a cardboard coaster and passed me one.
"If somebody ever wants a boat, mister, you take their money and drive to Sears and make the down payment on a johnboat. Then, if somebody else wants one, we'll rent a boat." She took a giant drag on her cigarette, blowing smoke to the ceiling, in a spreading roil.
At the boats, the kid was bailing away.
"Or let Bonaparte go to Sears," she said. "That kid can drive." She leaned a bit to one side and got a look of concentration on her face. I thought she was straining to see Bonaparte. I heard an odd, small, mewing noise. "Hope you don't mind gas," she said.
"It's two things he does. Drive and bail. It would be Christmas if he got to drive and get a dry boat."
Bonaparte was sitting almost chest deep, scooping the water near him and pouring it out at arm's length.
"Bonaparte," I said.
"That might be cruel," she said. "That might be cruel." She threw the ribbed rag at a big sink behind the bar.
"They told me he had a bone apart in his head to explain his condition. That's how they said it, too. Well, we weren't too excited about it. We weren't too excited about it and got drunk, and next thing we're calling him Bonaparte. Is that cruel?"
"I don't know," I said.
"You ready?"
Before I could gesture, another beer slid to within an inch of the one I was on. Bonaparte, steadily working, seemed to pause and listen to something between pours of his scoop. He was not more than a head and an arm bailing in a blinding disk of sun on water.
"He gives me the vim to go on," she said. I noticed him again pause as if listening to distant signals. "So, where'd you leave your clubs, Arnie?" She laughed at herself.
"Let's get you some khakis and tell all the customers you're the fish guide. Can you see the expression on their face when you wade into one of them wrecks with a Lorance under your arm?" She started wheezing with laughter. Recovering, she said, "That is some suit."
We drank, looking at Bonaparte bail.
"You wasn't. . golfing, was you?"
"No," I said.
"You a darts man?"
"Might be."
She marched over, lined up, wound up, and delivered-the dart went a half inch into the wall with a gratifying thuuung. On my turn, I missed the whole target, but I hit the wall and I hit it very hard, and she watched me like a spring-training scout, arms folded.
"You catch on fast," she said.
We played a game. In the late going-innings, I guess-she'd actually paw the floor as if grooving the mound, and grunt when she released. I had never seen better form. Not a customer came.
* * *
The fish-camp position made my time at Mary's seem an apprenticeship. Or it may be that Mary had me so well trained that certain early mistakes were avoided at the camp. Her name was Wallace ("That's cruel, too. Don't call me Wa1ly"), she played no roles other than the main one, and I mistook her for none else. You don't see a woman like her in a Sunday supplement. I did see her frequently in the regional fishing weekly, The Glade Wader. She'd create accounts of boatloads of fish brought in at our nameless camp (in the paper she called us Bonaparte's) and phone this apocrypha in to the editor, when we had not even made the down payment on the johnboat and Bonaparte was flailing away harder than ever.
We would clean the place-it never got messed up, really, but we soaked it down in Pine-Sol in the mornings anyway, because the cats carried crabs and fish under it and we were in effect disinfecting the ground as well as the floors. We poured gallons of pine-smelling ammonia out and swabbed ourselves into sweats by ten in the morning and split a six-pack and looked out of the easy gloom of the bar into the headachy light, and there, committed as a saint, full of belief, bailing the entire Gulf of Mexico, was Bonaparte. He took to blowing a whistle periodically, perhaps designating invisible progress.
"Vim," Wallace would say, both of us squinting at Bonaparte, both of us nodding, happy to be inside, in the cool gloom, dizzy on fumes and cold carbonation. A man came in one afternoon, sized the place up, had a beer, listened to Bonaparte bail and whistle, said, "Sounds like a disco out there," and left.
A couple came in one morning and watched him bail for a while before suddenly going into a disquisition on hippies. "We saw a van," the man said. "Purple."
"With butterflies on it," the woman added.
"All over it," the man said.
Wallace served them. We were just finishing the Pine-Sol detail. The woman opened both their beers and poured them into glasses which she inspected in the light before filling, squinting her nose at the ammonia. We could hear Bonaparte working as steadily in the glare coming from outside as a pump in an oilfield.
The light came in whole and hot and salty, and reflected off the damp board floor in broken, mirrory planes. The customers were shading their eyes.
"I wish all I had to do was drive around in a dope van all day," the man said.
"With butterflies on it," added the woman.
"That would be the life." He motioned to Wallace for beer number two. It was 10:30.
"Hippies," the woman said.
"What's he doing out there?" the man asked, with an emphasis that somehow seemed to link Bonaparte with the hippies.
"He's bailing, you sonofabitch," Wallace said, and she walked to the dart wall and planted a foot up on it and yanked out a dart. She wound up and fired one, and the sonofabitch and his wife left.
"See what I mean about you not offending customers?" she asked me. "I can do it, and I can do enough of it."
She fired three darts. "Sonofabitch thinks he can drink beer at ten o'clock and some kid can't drive a purple truck." A three-legged cat walked in with a large live crab in its mouth. "Get outside, honey," she said to it, and the cat backed easily out, the crab waving claws to us, as if for help.
After the demonstration of Wallace's diplomacy with customers, I assumed a new demeanor around the few that straggled in. I was a kind of personal valet, the ambassador of good will at Bonaparte's. My job, as I saw it, was to prevent customers from talking, lest they draw Wallace's wrath. I usually took their beer orders with the gravity of a funeral-home operator, giving a long, soulful look directly at them, then the slightest, tenderest nod I could manage toward Bonaparte out at the docks, then another kind of nod toward Wallace. This Wallace nod was in the thumb-jerk category, but was very subdued, and I followed it with a shrug, as if to say, Given the kid out there, the lady is disturbed, and likely to go of, you understand. Most did-in fact, some customers, provided this one-two of tactful apprising, gave an exaggerated and solemn nod of their own, clammed up altogether, and would point to their brand of beer rather than call it. These folk I had where I wanted-I felt like a matador with the bull quieted and sword ready. Wallace would interrupt the moment of their reverential silence with a great, sudden thuuung of dart that would make them spill beer.
Much of the beer consumed was consumed by Wallace and me. We got into a game of drinking certain kinds to correspond with brand deliveries, turning off all the beer clocks and signs except those representing the day's brand. We looked like seven individual low-budget beer commercials. I got inordinately fond of the first beers in the morning that we used to slake through the Pine-Sol, which felt like it was in our throats and was in our heads. The clear, cold bubbles of the beer washed in, stinging through the piney, gaggy, cottonlike ammoniac air of the freshly mopped bar, and after a good hard mopping that made you sweat and a couple of good cold cold ones to clear the eyes, we'd struggle to the wide, bright door and look out at pure air and heat and Bonaparte bailing and the headachy convection currents already coming off his toiling form and feel, somehow-I did, and I think Wallace did, too-as if the day was wonderful, the place fine, the weather clear, the salt tonic, the world good.