Jake’s accent had been thick. But I hadn’t known there was American speech, still a form of English, this far from the intelligible. For a moment I thought of asking him where he was from, just to note it down. But then, I probably wouldn’t recognize the name.
“Thanks,” I said, doubtfully, and smiled. I had no idea what I was thanking him for, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Thank you.”
I walked on by the boats.
The beefy guy unloading his blue pickup wore a shirt clutched around the flanks by giant, sweaty palm prints. All the buttons were gone, and he’d tied the front corners across a rug of belly hair bulging above and below the knot.
The guy carrying the boxes by me onto the boat looked pretty much like the guy I’d just talked to. He was barefoot and shirtless in the lancing heat, back and shoulders burned dark as a penny. His hair was spikey; his hands were grimy. Another carton on his shoulder, he trudged by no more than two feet away, without glancing at me — though he had to have seen me.
Standing on the gray dockboards, I thought: Most popular person in the eighth grade …? The guy who can make friends with anyone …? But if I can’t understand him, what will it matter? Maybe I should try the guy at the truck? But even as I turned, the older guy finished setting the last carton down and went around to the pickup’s other side.
The younger guy stepped down from the boat rail again, and paused a moment to take a breath.
I took one too and said, “You’re working on the boat there?”
He looked at me, nodded.
I took another one. “Do you know if there’s any chance of my getting a job around here?”
He said, “There is if you want to work.” His accent was as northern as my own and could have come from any New England state university senior.
“Sure,” I said. “That’s what I’m looking for!”
He rubbed his sunburned neck and called over to the truck, “Hey, Elmer!”
The middle-aged guy with the hairy belly stood up, frowned across the cab’s blue roof, and rubbed his dripping forehead with the heel of his hand. “What you want?” Elmer’s accent was rich with Texas twang.
“We’ve got a guy here looking for a job.”
Elmer came back around the pickup to stand in front of me. He looked me up and down. “You wanna paint a boat deck, you got a job. We’ll see how you do paintin’; then maybe I’ll take you on as a header. I need a third man.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“You a northern boy, like Ron here?” Elmer grinned.
“That’s right. I’m looking to work here for the summer. On the boats.”
The grin became a grunt. “Ron’ll show you what to do. He’s my first mate.” Elmer turned back to the truck.
I was still not sure if I actually had a job. If I did, though, it had been simple.
Ron must have intuited my confusion. He said, “I guess you’re hired. Elmer’s the captain. It’s his boat. And what he says goes. My name’s Ron. Where you from?”
Elmer had gotten in the truck; the tires crunched over gravel and sparse grass. “See you boys tomorrow,” he called from the window.
I considered a moment. Then I said, “I’m from New York.”
“No shit!” Ron grinned. “I’m from New Jersey!”
The boxes they’d been loading were full of cans of white deck paint.
I spent the rest of the afternoon with Ron, painting the deck of Elmer’s seventy-two-foot shrimp runner dead lead white, leaving a gray strip to the door of the cabin. By six I’d discarded my shirt like every other male under forty on the Aransas docks. Standing a moment to thumb sweat out of my eyes, I saw Jake walking by the boats. “Hi!” I waved.
“Captain came back.” Jake grinned at me. “And I just got my fuckin’ ass fired!”
“What happened?”
“After you left, I drank up the rest of the fuckin’ beer. You know any place ’round here I can get a job?”
Ron stepped up beside me. “This boat’s full,” he said. “We got our three men. But you just ask around, up and down the docks, here. You’ll get on.”
Ron bought me dinner since Elmer had gone home. I slept in the boat that night.
The next day, near two o’clock, when I was walking up toward the hamburger place, I saw a familiar figure coming down the dirt path beside the supermarket. He looked at me, grinned, and declared, “Well, howdy, stranger …!”
And my experiment in exhaustiveness is done.
58
58. But there’s a surprising amount I remember from those weeks in Texas. To recount some, then, with neither an eye for completeness and only a musical order:
That month I crewed on Elmer’s shrimp boat as “header”—the third man in the three-man crew, who pulls the heads off the shrimp, after they’re caught and before they’re iced down and stored in the boat’s deep, aluminum-sided hold. I slept in a blanket on a bare mattress in the forepeak, from under which, on my first night, I cleaned out a lot of used condoms and cigarette butts — left from the last header who’d had the job. Out at sea, the work ran twenty-four hours around the clock: three to sleep, four to fish, three to sleep, four to fish — a killing schedule to follow five or six days straight.
Kept up seven, eight, or ten days, it made some people really crazy. One first mate working out of the docks that summer was called Red, a name he had picked up in adolescence when his hair had actually been a fiery copper. Today it was just an overlong, nondescript blond with, around sunset, a brickish undertone. In his late twenties, lanky, and sunburned, he had freckled hands and cheeks.
As we were coming out of the hamburger place where I’d heard the waiter call him by name, I’d started talking to him because of a story Bob had told me about Aransas during his first days with us in New York. In his initial summer there, leaving Joanne behind in Florida, Bob had hung out with a bunch of fishermen, drinking, partying in motel rooms, fighting in bars, roistering in the smalltown streets, passing out with them around sunrise on their days away from the boats. “There was this one older guy, named Red. I always knew he kinda liked me. We’d all be sleepin’ in someone’s room, drunk out of our gourds, and I’d wake up ’cause I feel someone suckin’ on my dick. I’d look down and there he’d be, workin’ away. ‘What the fuck you doin’?’ I’d say; though I couldn’t help laughing. He did it pretty good. He’d shush me and whisper, ‘Don’t worry. It’s just me.’ Then he’d go back to work — right there in the room with all the others. But they was passed out. He did it regular, too, the whole summer. I swear, nobody else knew about it — unless he was doin’ all of us!”
I spent a couple of afternoons, sitting on barrels in the sun, talking with Red — but realized within the first ten minutes he was not the Red from Bob’s story. This was his first summer in the Aransas Pass. Nor did he know Bob at all. He had a pretty even temperament. And, in his Kentucky drawl, he could fish up a surprising amount about classical music! The header on the boat where Red was a first mate was a wino and oft-times derelict called Billy. Older than Red or the captain, Billy’s hair was red and stuck in matted, carroty hanks from under a navy blue cap gone coal color with grease. Billy’s eyes ran. All his toenails were smashed up and black — he went barefoot. And when he got to talking with you, he’d clutch your arm or shoulder, babbling on non-stop, repeating himself a lot, splattering a lot, and not making much sense.
Red’s captain was taking the boat out on a two-week run — which everybody said was pretty long. But after six days, they sailed back in.
In two tan Texas cars, the lights on the top like sun-dimmed eyes squinting about the noontime dock, the police were waiting at the waterfront. The rumor ran among the boats that Red was being put under arrest.