What I know now, though, is that what gave my realization its grim coloring was the inarticulate knowledge it was grounded on: no matter what boundaries I had crossed, desire (along with fear of the rejection of desire) might still erupt anywhere, to create new silences, new divisions, between the speakable and the unspeakable, the articulate and the inarticulable.
I fell asleep again.
Around six-thirty, I heard someone walking on deck. I swung my feet out, keeping my head low so as not to hit it on the overhead beams, came up, and wandered along the narrow bit of deck beside the cabin.
In his filthy cap with his matted hair spiking around it, Billy squatted by the lazarette puttering with something that had a rope on it. He looked pretty chipper for someone out drinking all night — though there was a pint bottle in his back pocket. He glanced up to grin at me over the couple of long yellow teeth that hung from his upper gum. “Well, now, hey there — how are you? Good mornin’. Huh? Hello, it’s nice out, ain’t it?”
“Hi, Billy,” I said.
“Yeah, good mornin’. How you doin’? You sleep in my bed last night? That’s okay. You wanna see Cap’? I think he’s still asleep. But he’ll be up soon. Ain’t it real nice out today? Hello, how you doin’ now?”
At which point Captain Joe, barefoot and in his jeans, shouldered out the galley door to the deck. Bob came out behind him about three beats later.
“Well, good morning,” I said; and then to the Captain, “Okay.” I grinned at Bob. “So long. See you when you get back in.”
Joe nodded at me, sleepily. “So long.”
Bob sighed and shook his head. I climbed over the gunwale to the dock and started down. I didn’t think Bob was going to argue with Joe about me — not that early in the morning. But in case he was tempted to, I figured I’d get going.
I went back to Elmer’s boat, into the cabin, and lay down on the other bunk across from sleeping Ron — when Elmer wasn’t on the boat, he’d said it was okay if I slept topside — and stretched out.
58.1. Memories of my time on the boat?
I tossed a handful of cubed salt pork into the black skillet, to hiss on the tiny galley stove, before I put in the chopped peppers and onions and tomatoes and chicken, while the soiled white plastic radio on the back of the counter twanged and drawled its steel guitar accompaniments to the tales of loose women and hard-drinking men — making the evening meal that edged Ron out of, and me into, the cook’s job with Elmer.
There was the time, my second afternoon on the boat, when I thought the jar at the back of the galley table (beside the radio) was full of sweet gherkins, took one out, and unknowingly bit into my first whole jalapeno — keeping me, after the moments of fire and blindness, gasping in mute pain another quarter of an hour.
One afternoon, when we were still in dock, Mrs. Elmer, a tall woman with a blue scarf around her head, drove down in the pickup to bring Ron and me a very large crock bowl of potato salad and a whole apple pie. “We were havin’ a barbecue out at the house. I was gonna bring you boys some ribs and chicken, but they ate up all the meat. Anyway, I just thought you might like a little home-cooked food.”
We devoured both within a couple of hours, then had to put up with Elmer’s teasing all the next day because only the clean dishes (I washed them that night in the galley’s too-small aluminum sink) were left: “Dear God in heaven, that was enough potato salad for six men — and you two e’t it up all in one night? You guys are gonna have eyes breakin’ out on you, soon! What is it, they don’t feed you up north?”
I don’t remember the first moments when the boat pulled away from the dock to sea — though I can reconstruct what they must have been.
And at sea, the doors (on the poorer boats they were sometimes just that: a pair of old wooden doors, though on most they were plank constructions, pretty much the same size) lowered from their cranes, left and right, by the winch, growling and yowling at the side of the cabin, to strike the running waves, sheeting up spray, angling wide to drag apart the nets.
I remember endless discussions with Ron over whether the little net Elmer ran from the hand winch at the back to test how the shrimp were running was a “try-net” (with which you “tried” the waters) or a “tri-net” (as it had three sides). Elmer didn’t know either, though he read paperback Westerns voraciously.
Elmer’s most repeated line was, “I got four teeth and five kids.”
And there was the first time (while, at the winch, Elmer worked the cable drum and Ron, at the wheel, kept the boat steady), with the rail against my belly and the twenty-foot gaff pole with its basketball-hoop-sized hook dragging down my arms, I leaned out over the water to snag the ropes of the doors and pull them in — reached out for them, and missed, and missed again. And missed a third time.
At the drum, laughing, Elmer called: “Go on. Go on, you son of a bitch! Go on! You some poor excuse for a header! Try again. Go on an’ get ’em now!” At which point, on my next lunge, I got them. The net ropes jerked the gaff in my hands, yanking me against the rail hard enough to make me lose my breath — no, I didn’t drop the gaff pole. “Just as well too,” Elmer explained, when I was sitting on a basket, actually in the midst of my first heading — that part of the job, at least, was easy. Later, with our wide brooms, Ron and I swept the “trash” (seaweed, myriad fish, rocks, more fish, and everything else the sopping nets hauled onto the deck that wasn’t shrimp) out through the scupper holes and back into the sea. “’Cause if you had,” Elmer told me, laughing, for the fifth time, “I’d’ve thrown you right overboard and made you swim till you got it — and I’m damned if Id’a let you back on until you did.” I laughed too: and swept — and thought of Billy, of Red.
Brought up as a fairly polite guy, for the first day out I called Captain Elmer “Sir.” I figured that was what you called a boat captain. But after the first time Elmer, at the winch, lowered his nets and doors down into the water (and I called out, as I’d been instructed: “They’re in, sir”), he turned to me, rather angrily: “You gotta quit this ‘Sir’ shit, boy, even if you are from the north! You ain’t no nigger! So I don’t want you talking to me like a nigger. You a nigger, you can call me ‘Sir.’ But you a white man, you can call me by my name!”
“Yes, sir …” I began, surprised, scared, and at a loss for what to say. “I mean, yes. …”
Later, when Elmer was taking a nap and Ron and I leaned against the rail, looking at the runneled troughs closing and opening in the iron sea (a near green-black — under a sky as gray as a cat — that reflected almost nothing), Ron said to me, a little amazed, “I don’t think he realizes you’re Negro!”
I said: “I don’t think he does either!”
We both looked at each other, shrugged; then, hoping my father’s shade would not descend in wrath, I started calling Elmer “Elmer.”
And after four days out, when I stepped down, after Ron and Elmer, onto the dock, I felt as though the grayed boards moved more than the boat deck ever had. The world waved under me like water as I walked up the waterfront gravel and asphalt.
58.2. It seems from my first day in Aransas Pass, people were suggesting that I go see Tony. “He’s from up north, like you,” Jake explained. “He just bought himself a boat down here a couple of months ago — but he’s been working out of the docks along about two years. He’s another captain, now — his boat’s right up there. He lives with his wife just outside of Aransas. They got a little baby. But his wife’s from up north, too. You guys’ll like each other. Maybe he’ll give you a job, ’cause you’re both from the same place.” Well, I had a job, so it wasn’t a pressing priority. “Tony thinks everybody down here is just a dumb hick!” Jake grinned. “He may be right, too.”