Mileage on a Rootloose Outboard let’s call Bob’s memoirs. If I’m to leave them to him, better I not retaste Annette’s dense, medium-rare beef liver of ’68 in order to prophesy in rich retrospect that the upwards of three thousand dollars Bob got hold of to buy special, fine herring nets would return him a surprise. Maybe I’ll leave him to tell that one, though his kind of patience is not for memoirs but for the rough interruptions life courts and absorbs. I’ll let him explain, if he will, at length (though let me, on the keyboard of my exclamation-less Junior Corona, copy for him): how riding adrift slowly on the fragile night lid of his cove, and all alone, he saw down past the gunwale and then out everywhere the space below bursting with luminous bodies, and how also their slippery phosphorescence held him off with the odd funny-bone feel you got from John B.’s Christmas magnets when you forced repellent ends together, but beautiful, in particular and in plenty: how instead of losing his money, his gross on one haul trebled it, even if he did have to wait a while, relying on islander reports; how with some experienced help — but this first try acting instinctively on what he’d heard said — he walled his weighted nets across the inner cove and at the crisis, moving two boats quickly together completed the trap’s landward side and commenced narrowing; how the company steamer showed just after sunset and ten thousand dollars of big silver herring were sucked by a steady old engine up out of the cove into the two lighted holds.
After a nasty little discussion with Bob Petty (who then had private words with Bob and put a hand on his hip) would have let the boys stay for the haul and go aboard the steamer — whose name, Dom, is too symbolic to use here — and then sleep at the camp. But Bob got his professor pal to take her and the boys along when he crossed back to the mainland. We are on the ground of the ’60’s. We stood upon the granite shelf Bob’s camp was based on above that black-green cove. Buoys marked the herring corral, and Bob said “that woman” picked only the busiest times to tell him she loved him when she knew damn well he couldn’t drop everything; and once he’d told her to get her timing right.
“I guess I almost give her what she wants,” but the straying tone was because he was watching a man way over on the nubble. It didn’t matter. We had a drink and Bob told how he and the company men would finish the job and how close in the steamer would have to come to get its hose into the trap, and we had another drink and I thought maybe the steamer was going to have to run over one of the lobster buoys beyond the entrance to Bob’s cove, but Bob said Oh no.
The earth-turn was making it harder to see the man on the nubble; and because of the Land Rover, whose cab we could just see over the far dune, and because after all how many other people did I know around Portland and the bay area however you measured it, I thought I knew who that man was at the other end of that distance.
Then I didn’t know why I’d come up to see Bob and Petty and that didn’t matter either. Bob stood up from the two-and-a-half-inch chuck steak he was charcoaling and said he’d like to get hold of that fellow’s Land Rover, and we both laughed. In the new offshore breeze it didn’t matter to me and in fact was pleasant that it was all the same to Bob who he had supper with. I mean only that he’d have been equally curious about that lobsterman who was one day soon afterward to throttle his outboard up too suddenly and fall drunk over the stern into the bay knocking the tiller around, equally curious about (say) a lonesome savant bookseller smelling the watery world, or about his friend Leo’s pivotal rise in the regional chapter of something (now running for President; never missed a meeting; won Blue-Chip All-State fund-raiser award; has two lovely children, a five-year-old (adorable) girl Kimberley and a seven-year-old boy James; running on two main planks, Membership Seminar and Program to Secure Sponsors for state and federal programs), or equally curious about “what in the hell” I was doing exploring “displacement of food/energy parabonds by intellect/energy parabonds in the wilds of the biotic city.” Bob didn’t mind the brokerage business. He liked manipulating Leo in a small way who for his part thought he was doing statistical follow-ups that — and here Leo wryly lowered his voice — Bob wouldn’t have done so efficiently.
After this beautiful evening of profit, those expensive nets that in one use had paid for themselves remained in Bob’s mainland cellar behind the bags of cement. (My Junior Corona, after that awful April Saturday in 1946 when it was stolen from my father, turned into a grown-up portable which among other things had a back-spacer.) But waiting for the mammoth steak to get done and waiting for the little steamer to appear and interrupt the natural settling of dusk, I let the liquor’s rich smoke ask in my weightless chest the question, “Why did Robby, leaving the island only a shade less reluctantly than John B. and always making it obvious I was a very special favorite with him, say to me over the Brandeis economist’s gunwale as I tossed some mollifying quip to Petty amidship, ‘Cy, you should get married.’” For he’d just witnessed a harsh difference of opinion between Bob and Petty and for that minute or two he and John B. had gone back to the heterogenous stationary vehicle they had shoved together out of crates and drift timber, and had tried to be busy till the difference of opinion was resolved. “What a funny thing for Robby to say to me”—Bob stood up and side-stepped the steak smoke—“he said I ought to get married.”
“Robby’s only a child,” said Bob looking out toward where we were expecting the steamer to appear. Petty had bought that steak for four or five of us; she’d thought the boys would stay the night, though she herself would have to get back home to the mainland to the baby.
“Maybe he’s only a child, but he’s spooky.”
I have just returned, Dom, to your kitchen to check that list of penciled excuses above the white phone I hung up, and since while there I had another look in the fridge though I knew what I’d find, I thought of the liver Ev served me tonight and of all that biotin — also known as Vitamin H (H for Hepatoscopy perhaps?) — spreading through the field of my system. But unlike ancient seers I foretell the past.
“Nothing spooky about him,” Bob decrees. “I just wish he wouldn’t mope around the hi-fi and fiddle with the changer. Petty says he’s musical.”
“What if he is?”
“Robby’s only a child.”
“What does his know about you?”
Bob squatted by the grill staring into his drink. “What’s there to know?”
: that a week or so before the Heights fight (which was probably two weeks after my Junior Corona disappeared from the downstairs entrance of our apartment house where my father had set it down to run across the street and help Mrs. Bolla get out of a cab with a carton) Perpetua Pound told Bob’s father of an event she knew only from me. Now, as I neared the end of my step-by-step account of the April afternoon Bob fired his boomerang northwest off the Brooklyn Bridge and it rose athwart a gusty southwest breeze and wheeled back toward the cable network between us and it, I took a breath and prepared to describe the concluding arc of that proud Christmas gift from his father that I had duplicated (except mine had a strip of adhesive tape) with Christmas money from none other than Uncle Cooley. But Pet’s open mouth found words to enter my pause—“It came back! It came back! Bobby got it back1”— and looking at her dark lashes and her tongue curling preoccupied up against her lip, I drew a line of neutral energy through this field of living chance by saying only, “Yeah, it came back all right,” and thought what the hell, that was the end of that particular story. So when Petty ingratiated herself with Bob’s dad by telling all about it the next day at a cocktail party her “Pappy” gave in honor of his friend Mrs. Bolla’s substantial return from Tucson, the received version was that the Christmas cross-stick had closed a wild loop returning incredibly to the boardwalk of the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian way. It was at least true that a moment later Bob and I were traced there by Hugh and Freddy on information from Stingy Bill. That very night Petty visited me, she was having trouble with her Latin teacher. Bob phoned just after I tried to tell her the boomerang story, and she waved at me not to tell him she was with me, which later she smiled happily over, saying she’d surprise him with the fact tomorrow; but he didn’t come to her father’s cocktail party. Will your phone ring?