This, too, was an invariable part of our conversation.
“Sausages? Two pounds?”
“Right.”
“Oranges?”
“Still have plenty.”
“Cooking oil?”
“Got some.”
“Cigarettes? Hell no, you don’t smoke. ‘Less you started since I saw you last?”
“Not yet, Clint.”
“Cause the Lord said no,” he said. When I had first started coming to the store, Clinton Mackey had tried discussing current events with me. Politics, inflation, the state of the world. I broke him of this by telling him that I was a religious person and didn’t believe in radios or newspapers or getting involved with more than one’s immediate area. Any mania is instantly excused in the name of religion; he now shut off his own radio the moment he saw me coming.
“Fish line, fish hooks, fish anything?” I shook my head. “Bait? No, you use fish bait, don’t you? Catching much lately?”
“Some.”
“Whiskey? A quart of shine, which the Lord loves, it being a natural product?” My religion was a devious one. “Not the best I’ve ever stocked, but better than the last.”
Two drinks every day before dinner, otherwise none. “My bottle’s running dry,” I said. “Better let me have a pint.”
“Didn’t bring the bottle, did you? Course not, if it’s not altogether dry. Do you mind taking a quart? Thing is, I’m out of pint bottles, but I could pour out some soda bottles if you want.”
“A quart’s all right.”
“And bottled water, of course. Three gallons? Four?”
“Three.”
“Tins, now, you’ll help yourself.”
I went over to the shelves of canned goods and picked out what I wanted, then selected a couple of pork chops and a steak from the meat cooler. Clint went down the rest of his list — String? Twine? Axe handle, whetstone, matches, bandaids, iodine? Coffee? Toothbrush, toothpaste, ’hesive tape? Batteries, dry cell or wet? And what-all else? Dozen aigs and what-all else and what did I forget?
“Couple new books on the rack,” he added. “Might have a look while I pack this up.”
There were no books that interested me. I had given up fiction long ago, and the two nonfiction titles on the rack didn’t appeal. One was philosophy, which I figured was just fiction without a story line, and the other was a basic guide to atomic physics; I read the first few pages and decided it would be too difficult for me. I still had almost half of The Lives of the Great Composers to read, plus a history of Australia and New Zealand.
“Next time the book delivery comes, ask him if he can come up with a paperback dictionary.”
“Damn, and he was just here, and you asked me that last week and I forgot. I’ll do that, though. I’ll remember.”
I wasn’t quite sure why I wanted the dictionary. It was never that difficult to guess the meanings of those words which I didn’t know.
Clint helped me carry the goods to the boat. I was able to dock just a few dozen yards from his store. We made two trips and filled the little rowboat with cartons. “Just about room in there for you,” he said, “and you can bet she’ll run lower in the water than she did coming over here.” This was another of the things that he always said.
“Well, ’bye now.”
“’Bye.”
“And I’ll remember about that dictionary. Sorry for forgetting, and I’ll make a point to remember.”
“If you happen to. If not, don’t worry about it.”
“Man who worries loses his hair.” This was a joke — he was bald as a dozen aigs and what-all else. “Take care, now!”
The boat rode lower in the water, which was certainly understandable, but not low enough to make any difference. He went back into his house and I rowed the boat steadily and evenly, putting my back into it, enjoying the way my muscles slipped at once into the proper meter. The sun was high in the sky, the sea was blue and still. It was good to be alive. It was really, honestly good to be alive.
I had reached my little island as the occasional bits of driftwood did, by floating with the tide. Miami was no good at all. People, noise, music, hot outside and frigidly air-conditioned inside. I spent a very bad week there. That week would have been bad anywhere, but Miami made it worse.
Eventually I got to Key West, and that wasn’t right either, but it was better than Miami. I compared the two and figured out what it was that made Key West better than Miami, and then it became easy to determine just what sort of place I was looking for.
I got off on the wrong track for a while. I thought it might be ideal to live on a small boat, going wherever I wanted whenever I wanted. I went around pricing boats and decided I had more than enough cash to swing what I wanted.
My list helped me. Buying a boat was spending money, and spending money wasn’t doing nothing. Buying a boat also meant owning a boat, and I had already figured out that the less I owned, the better off I was. If I couldn’t carry it with me or throw it away, I didn’t want it. And worst of all, a boat would enable me to move around. The one thing I wanted to do was stay in one place. Moving around is not doing nothing.
So I let a few real estate men show me rental property on the smaller keys, and one of them took me around Mushroom Key. I was all set to take a small house there when the realtor’s motorboat passed a little island the size and shape of a football field, with a little weathered shack at one end of it. I asked what it was, and he said he was damned if he knew, but during the hurricane season it would blow to hell and gone. I asked who owned the island, and if anyone lived in the shack. He said he didn’t know. I told him to take me back to Mushroom Key directly. He tried to argue me out of this, and I told him if he didn’t do what I said I would throw him overboard and see if he could swim. He thought I was joking, so I threw him overboard. It turned out that he couldn’t swim, so I had to jump in and rescue him, but after that he ran me straight back to Mushroom Key without a word.
And it was Clinton Mackey who answered my questions. Who lived in the island? Nobody. A man named Gaines had lived there, a wino, no one ever knew his first name, and several months ago he had disappeared. It was presumed that he had drowned. Who owned the island? Again, nobody. Well, the state, probably, but it didn’t really matter who owned it. Gaines sure as hell hadn’t owned it, nor paid a cent of rent on it, and he lived there without any trouble, except of course the trouble of drowning.
I started moving in that afternoon. It took me two days to move in with everything I needed, and it took me just about a month to belong there. There was no particular day when it happened. There was just one day after another, exercising and fishing and reading the Do Nothing list, eating and sleeping and taking two drinks of corn whiskey before dinner, swimming and getting brown and rowing to Mushroom Key and back, until somewhere along the way I passed a point without even noticing it.
The point of not returning, I called it.
Because until then I had regarded all of this as a sort of emotional Operation Bootstraps, a self-guided course of therapy with an undefined but never-forgotten goal. Someday, I had thought, I would have it all sorted out, and it would no longer be necessary to stay away from the rest of the world. Some glorious day I would come down from the mountain with two tables of stone in my hands. Some day I would know what role I could best play in life, and I would be ready to play it.
But the island surprised me. It turned unseen from a means to an end. There was no need to leave it, not now, not ever. At the present rate, my money would last forty years. So, it seemed, would I–I had never been in such extraordinarily fine physical shape in my life. My emotional condition was becoming comparably excellent. The bad dreams and the night sweats came further and further apart. Unwelcome thoughts bothered me less and less. I slept well, I ate hungrily, my digestion was sound. Doing Nothing evidently agreed with me. Clinton Mackey provided just the right amount of human contact; I looked forward to seeing him every sixth day, and after half an hour with him I was anxious to get back to my island again.