“For what?” I asked Jake.
Attempted murder. Red had tried to kill Billy. Out on the boat.
“How? What in the world did he do?”
Tried to drown the sorry son of a bitch. (The information had come in over the radio from the boat captain, Jake explained.) Threw him off the goddamn boat, right over the goddamn side.
“Why? What happened?”
Said he couldn’t stand the sorry fucker. Said he didn’t like the way he looked, the way he smelled, or the way he washed dishes (the header is the dishwasher on the boat — and, in my case, on Elmer’s boat, cook too), or the way he splats all over you when he talks, and if he said another three words to Red, he was gonna drown him —
“Three words? That would be pretty hard with Billy.”
Yeah. Billy kept on hangin’ on him, so Red threw Billy over the rail. And when Billy tried to climb back on, Red took a goddamn gaff and began to bang on his hands and knock him back into the water. The Captain told him to cut it out, a joke is a joke, but Red said he wasn’t joking, he was gonna drown him. And when Billy swum up, Red tried to poke him underwater with the gaff — then the Captain said, hey, come on now, and he and Red had a fight, and the Captain finally had to tie Red up and haul Billy back on board; and Red said he’d better keep him tied up, too, ’cause if he let him loose again he’d just finish off what he’d already started. So the Captain called in to the shore patrol and they told him to call the goddamn police …!
With a dozen other boatmen, we watched the waterfront officers lead Red off the deck. He was just handcuffed, now; and he had an expression somewhere between annoyance and bewilderment. He nodded at a couple of people, including me, while he was getting in the car. He didn’t say anything, though. They drove him up into town.
Red’s captain, who’d stopped it all, was a guy about twenty-seven, a little younger than Red. He was big and pretty easygoing himself. He looked kind of like a bear.
A fist on his jeans at his cowboy belt, he stepped down on the dock, now to talk to a waterfront policeman, now to squint after the police car driving off, now to furrow his bare, shaggy chest with broom-handle thick fingers on which the wide nails were bitten back till they were shorter, oil-lined cuticle to dirt-rimmed crown, than most five-year-olds’.
“I’ll tell ya’.” Beside me, Bob shook his head. “Billy’s pretty lucky.” (Billy had run off the boat even before we’d come up. Everybody kept asking about him.) “Things like that happen all the time out there. If the Captain had felt the same way Red did, it would’ve just turned into an ‘accident.’ And nobody would never’ve said nothin’ about it again.”
“I can believe it.” Ron shook his head too.
And an hour later, Bob was hired to fill Red’s firstmate job. As soon as he and the Captain had a beer on it, he loped down to Elmer’s boat looking for me. “Come on. Maybe I get you a job as header on my boat with Captain Joe.”
So I went up with him. We sat around, the three of us, on overturned pails, talking. Bare-chested Captain Joe was a slow, affable, almost overly polite Texan (beside whom Bob, with his jokes and enthusiasms, looked like a parody of some city slicker). It was his father’s boat, he told us. In past years he’d been first mate but was running it this summer as captain, since his father didn’t want to work it any more. As we sat around talking and telling our stories (I’d given Bob a strict order not to tell anyone I was a writer. He’d followed it, but every once and a while, when there was an ordinary pause in the conversation, I could see him kind of balking), I got the impression Joe liked me. I certainly liked him. But finally he leaned forward and said, almost sheepishly: “’Bout you workin’ on the boat. As a header, I mean. That’s Billy’s job, see. Ain’t nothin’ I can do about that. He worked with my daddy. Now you can stay on the boat tonight, if you want. Billy’s an old alkie, and he’s out gettin’ drunk now, I know that. After what happened, I don’t blame him. He ain’t gonna be back tonight, I know that too. Well, I’m shovin’ out tomorrow mornin’, no matter what. ’Cause I wanna get fishin’ again. After all this mess with Red, I ain’t gonna feel good till I get back to work. But I’ll tell you, it’s fifty-fifty Billy’ll show up. Oh, he knows I’m goin’. I told him that. But if he don’t show before we leave, then you got the job. If he do come back, though — ” Joe shrugged hairy shoulders and grinned, turning up his wide, hard fisherman’s hands. “Well, then, there ain’t nothin’ I can do. He goes out with me and you don’t. That all right with you?”
“Sure,” I said. “At least I got a chance.” I grinned at Bob, who grinned back — though I think he would have liked it all a little firmer.
“Like I say.” Joe shrugged again. “With Billy, it’s fifty-fifty.”
“Well,” Bob said. “I’ll work with anybody. But I kinda hope Billy has himself a real good time tonight!”
Bob had stayed on Elmer’s boat for three nights. Now I went back down to tell Ron that if I didn’t show up the next morning I had another job — if not, don’t mention it to Elmer (who wasn’t coming by the boat till three or four in the afternoon these days) and things would go on as they had been. That night I stayed on Captain Joe’s boat. The sleeping quarters for the header were a lot nicer than on Elmer’s. There was a real bunk, for one thing.
The mosquitoes came out just after sunset’s salmon drowned in indigo evening. We went inside the galley, to close the screen door behind us and turn on the dim ceiling bulb, Joe making the obligatory jokes about getting mosquito bites on your dick when you went to take a piss. (All the boats had inside johns, but it seemed to be a mark of pride — at least for pissing — not to use them. And, as Bob said to me, shaking himself off over the rail, when, once, I mentioned it to him: “It all ends up in the same place anyway.”) Later I came out on the night deck, made my way around the cabin up to the forepeak, went down the little ladder, swatting at mosquitoes, pulled the framed screening across the opening, and went to sleep, curious about morning.
According to the temperature lights on the front corner of the supermarket, daytime temperatures in Aransas Pass that summer were sometimes as high as a hundred and four. Nighttime temperatures seldom fell below seventy-five. But because, even on the ocean, it was a dry heat, it was more tolerable than New York’s steaming damp.
Near five I woke up in the warm slantlight, had to take a leak, got my jeans on, and went out to the seaside rail of the boat. The lifting sun was low, the sky was bright, and long shadows from the cabin darkened the rail. As I was finishing and zipping up, I glanced at the cabin window. Through the porthole I could see across to the bunk where, on his back, Captain Joe lay asleep. The sheet he’d slept under had slid off, hanging only over one foot. He slept naked, one hand on his hirsute gut. His other arm was jackknifed over his face. A morning erection angled above his belly, a crane of flesh rising, lowering, rising again with his breath —
Abruptly I found myself in that ambiguous state between the psychological and the physiological that is desire. I started to walk back to the forepeak, but lingered to look another minute, glancing, now and again, to see if anyone was looking at me; and stayed a minute more — till, inside, Joe tried to kick his foot free of the sheet, raised his knee, then let it slide slowly down again — still, I was sure, sleeping.
At the forepeak, I climbed down, slid into the bunk, and stretched out.
What I knew then was that even if I worked on this boat with Bob, there would be no sex, neither with Bob nor anyone else. Between custom, my own reticence, and the work schedule that had raised Red’s irritation to the homicidal and nearly killed Billy, it would be impossible. Chin on my forearm, I brooded on it.