She had no engine and I had to row her in and out of the basin. When the wind dropped, I’d just let the canvas slat around while I hung over the transom staring down the light shafts into the depths. Then when it piped up, she’d trim herself and I’d slip around to the tiller and take things in hand. Sailboats were never used in the Missouri border fighting.
I went out today because my nose hurt from Peavey’s goons and because I was up against my collapse; and because Catherine wouldn’t see me. My hopes were that the last was the pain of vanity. It would be reassuring to think that my ego was sufficiently intact as to sustain injury; but I couldn’t bank that yet.
The wind was coming right out of the southeast fresh, maybe eight or ten knots, and I rowed just clear of the jetty and ran up the sails, cleated off the jib, sat back next to the tiller, pointed her up as good as I could, and jammed it right in close to the shrimp boats before I came about and tacked out of the basin. I stayed on that tack until I passed two iron wrecks and came about again. The sharpie is so shoal I could take off cross-country toward the Bay Keys without fear of going aground. I trimmed her with the sail, hands off the tiller, cleated the main sheet, and turned on some Cuban radio. I put my feet up and went half asleep and let the faces parade past.
Immediately east of the Pearl Basin, I found a couple shivering on a sailboard they had rented at the beach. He was wearing a football jersey over long nylon surfing trunks; and she wore a homemade bikini knotted on her brown, rectilineal hips. What healthy people! They had formed a couple and rented a sailboard. They had clean shy smiles, and though they may not have known their asses from a hole in the ground in terms of a personal philosophy, they seemed better off for it, happier, even readier for life and death than me with my ceremonious hours of thought and unparalleled acceleration of experience.
I rigged the board so that it could be sailed again, standing expertly to the lee of them with my sail luffing. I told them they were ready to continue their voyage and she said to the boy, “Hal, it’s a bummer, I’m freezing.” And Hal asked me if she could ride back in my boat because it was drier. I told them I’d be sailing for a while, that I had come out to think, that I was bad company, and that my father had died in the subways of Boston. They said that was okay, that she would be quiet and not bother me. I let her come aboard, politely concealing my disappointment; then shoved Hal off astern. He was soon underway, with his plastic sailboard spanking on the chop, the bright cigarette advertisement on his sail rippling against the blue sky.
I continued toward the Bay Keys while the girl watched me with cold gray eyes, the shadow of the sail crossing her slowly at each tack. Then she went forward and took the sun with her hands behind her head.
“Your boyfriend a football player?” I asked.
“No, he deals coke.”
“I see.”
“Do you like coke?”
“Yes, quite a lot.”
“Well, Hal has some Bolivian rock you can read your fortune in, I’ll tell you that.”
“Oh, gee, I—”
“Anybody ever tell you the difference between acid and coke?”
“Nobody ever did.”
“Well, with acid you think you see God. With coke you think you are God. I’ll tell you the honest truth, this rock Hal’s got looks like the main exhibit at the Arizona Rock and Gem Show. Did you ever hear a drawl like mine?”
“No, where’s it from?”
“It’s not from anywhere. I made the god damn thing up out of magazines.”
“How much of that rock is left?”
“One o.z. No more, no less. At a grand, it’s the last nickel bargain in Florida.”
“I’ll take it all.”
“We’ll drop it off. Hey, can you tell me one thing, how come you got hospitalized? The papers said exhaustion but I don’t believe everything I read. You don’t look exhausted.”
“It was exhaustion.”
That night, after I had paid them, I asked if the business in the boats that afternoon had been a setup. She said that it had. “Don’t tell him that!” giggled the boyfriend. “You coo-coo brain!”
* * *
My eyes were out on wires and I was grinding my teeth. When I chopped that shit, it fell apart like a dog biscuit. Bolivian rock. I didn’t care. I just made the rails about eight feet and blew myself a daydream with a McDonald’s straw. Let them try and stop me now!
By the time I got to Reynolds Street I was in tears. I went down to the park and crossed over to Astro City. The ground was beaten gray and flat and the tin rocketships were unoccupied. I climbed high enough on the monkey bars that no one could look into my eyes and wept until I choked.
I considered changing my name and cutting my throat. I considered taking measures. I decided to walk to Catherine’s house again and if necessary nail myself to her door. I was up for the whole shooting match.
I walked over to Simonton, past the old cigar factory, around the schoolyard and synagogue, and stopped at the lumber company. I bought a hammer and four nails. Then I continued on my way. On Eaton Street, trying to sneak, I dropped about a gram on the sidewalk. I knelt with my red and white straw and snorted it off the concrete while horrified pedestrians filed around me. “It takes toot to tango,” I explained. Nylon and Platt would love to catch me at this, a real chance to throw the book. I walked on, rubbing a little freeze on my gums and waiting for the drip to start down my throat and signal the advent of white-line fever or renewed confidence.
The wind floated gently into my hair, full of the ocean and maritime sundries from the shipyard. A seagull rocketed all the way from William Street close to the wooden houses, unseen, mind you, by any eyes but mine. A huge old tamarind dropped scented moisture into the evening in trailing veils. Mad fuck-ups running to their newspapers and greasy dinners surged around my cut-rate beneficence. I felt my angel wings unfold. More than that you can’t ask for.
Catherine’s house with her bicycle on the porch was in a row of wooden cigarmakers’ houses grown about with untended vegetation, on a street full of huge mahoganies. I thought to offer her a number of things — silence, love, friendship, departure, a hot beef injection, shining secrets, a tit for a tat, courtesy, a sensible house pet, a raison d’être, or a cup of coffee. And I was open to suggestion, short of “get outa here,” in which case I had the hammer and nails and would nail myself to her door like a summons.
I crossed the street to her house, crept Indian style onto the porch, and looked through the front window. Catherine was asleep on the couch in her shorts and I thought my heart would stop. I studied her from this luxurious point, staring at the wildly curly hair on her bare back; her arm hung down and her fingertips just rested on the floor next to a crammed ashtray. I had the nails in my shirt pocket, the hammer in the top of my pants like Jesse James’s Colt.
“Catherine,” I said, “you let me in.” This handsome woman, whom Peavey had once had the nerve to call my common-law wife, was suddenly on her feet, walking toward me with jiggling breasts, to ram down the front window and bolt the door. Then she went upstairs and out of sight. I called her name a couple of more times, got no answer, and nailed my left hand to the door with Jesse’s Colt.