I frowned. A diehard cultural relativist, I didn’t find that a high recommendation — and put meeting Tony a little lower down on my list of things to do.
But Ron knew Tony too. “Yeah, we should go over and say hello, so you can meet him. He’s an Italian guy — from New Jersey; not too far from where I come from. His wife Sandy is real nice.”
We walked up along the boats.
“Here we go,” Ron said, stopping at a boat a shade smaller than Elmer’s seventy-two-footer.
Wearing a pair of marine fatigue pants and no shirt, a muscular guy about thirty stood on deck, chiseling something from under the eaves of his cabin.
“Hey!” Ron called. “Tony, this is Chip. He’s headin’ with me down on Elmer’s boat.”
Tony looked over his shoulder. “Hi, there, Chip.”
“Hello,” I said.
Maybe it was just the accent that made him pause and come over to the rail. “You’re working down with Elmer? Glad to meet you.” He held out a hand.
I shook it. “Glad to meet you.”
“Chip came down here with a partner — a guy from Florida, Bob. He took over Red’s job, after all that nonsense.”
“Yeah. That was too bad about Red. Were you guys here for that?”
I nodded. “Red was a pretty nice fellow.”
“Red was fuckin’ crazy!” Tony said, with some vehemence. But I couldn’t tell if it had come after the fact, or was based on prior knowledge. Tony went on: “Why’d you come down here?”
“We were hitchhiking together,” I explained, “Bob and me. Bob had worked here before, a couple of years ago. So this is where we ended up.”
“Where did you start out from?”
“New York.” I felt rather like I was confessing.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “I been in New York. It’s a real lively place. Where’d you live?”
“The Lower East Side,” I told him.
“Oh.” He frowned a little. “Well, I wasn’t ever in that part. But I like New York. I like it down here, too.” Then he laughed. “I pretty much figured that you weren’t from around here. But you don’t sound like a New Yorker either.”
“A lot of people say that,” I told him. “But I am. You’ve been down here a couple of years, now. You must like it.”
“It’s okay.” He put his hands on the rail and cocked his head a little to the side. “How do you like it?”
“Well, I haven’t been down a full two weeks. But the people seem pretty friendly.”
“Oh, they’re friendly all right. They’re real nice. But they start to get to you, after a while. I mean, there’s not too much going on here.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s a little town.”
“But I mean,” Tony persisted, “there’s nothing to do. Nobody reads anything — not even a newspaper. Then, one day you realize half the guys working on this dock don’t even know how to read. Nobody can speak English — ”
“Well, it’s a different accent,” I said. I wondered if I ought to mention the carton of Westerns shoved back under Elmer’s bunk. But I suspect that would have counted with Tony no more than the science fiction novels I was not mentioning I wrote myself.
“I mean decent English, like you learn in school. Just ordinary good grammar. I don’t hold myself any kind of intellectual, now. But I don’t say ‘ain’t’ and I don’t say ‘y’all.’ You talk to any ten guys on this dock, and you may not even find one who got out of high school. And a whole lot of them didn’t get out of the third grade. I only went to college for two years. I never graduated. But at least I got a high school diploma. Down here, them things are rare. Most people don’t even think that’s important.”
“You stayed in college longer than I did,” I told him.
“Okay, not everybody has to finish college. I didn’t. You didn’t. But, I mean, even with just a couple of sentences, I could tell you’d had some kind of education. And you’re a friend of Ron’s. Doesn’t just listening to some of the people talking down here kind of grab you in the craw? I mean, listening to them, thinking about what it means, well — sometimes it just makes me uncomfortable.”
“I suppose so.” I laughed. (Today I suspect his preoccupation was his new child’s coming education. But that morning it didn’t occur to me.) “Sometimes.” But, if anything, Tony’s judgments on all around us were probably the most uncomfortable-making things I’d heard yet.
Still — after Jake’s warning — as Tony went on, I realized a good deal of it was just a misguided attempt to put me — as an “educated northerner”—at my ease: a litany he felt obliged to go through more than a real opinion. “My wife likes it here,” he went on. “I think sometimes she misses being up home with her family and everything. But she likes it. And the boats haven’t been doing too bad by me.”
“How’s Sandy and the baby?” Ron asked. Knowing Tony better, perhaps he recognized the thrust of his complaint.
“Aw,” Tony said, “the baby’s just getting cuter and cuter; and bigger and bigger!”
“She started off cute,” Ron said. “How big can she get in three months? Hey, Tony, you know Chip here plays the guitar, too.”
“You do?” Tony asked. “Ron’s pretty good on that thing — you heard him play, yet?”
“Naw,” Ron said. “I don’t mean like me. Chip can really play it.”
Ron had a stalwart acoustic Gibson with him; we’d spent a couple of hours over a couple of days, playing together.
“I like guitar music and singing — you play folk music?”
“That’s the kind I like,” I said.
“A couple of times I sat around listening to Ron play. That was really nice.”
“If you liked that,” Ron said, “you should hear Chip.”
“Yeah? Sandy likes it too,” Tony said. “Maybe we could come down to the boat, some evening. We’ll bring some beer. And we can all sit around and you guys can play and we could have a nice time. Would that be okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind. It’d be fun.”
“I mean, it’s something to do,” Tony said. “After you’ve seen the movie, there isn’t much to do for the next two weeks till another one comes along. They never get any good ones anyway.”
“You could come down to Elmer’s boat this evening,” Ron said. “Bring Sandy. Elmer’s not going to be there. He stays down with his family when he’s in port.”
“Well, we aren’t doing anything this evening. If Sandy’s up to it, we’ll probably come on down. Maybe around seven-thirty or so. She really likes that kind of music. And so do I.”
Bob’s boat came in that afternoon. He wandered down to Elmer’s that evening; Ron said it was okay if he stayed for dinner. (Elmer was up at his house again.) I cooked — and more or less forgot about Tony and his wife, till, while I was at the sink, washing up, outside on the dock someone called: “Hello? Well, I see a light on in the galley — so somebody’s gotta be home. Hey, hello in there?”
At the galley table, Bob frowned and Ron looked up: “That’s Tony!”
We went outside.
I don’t know why there weren’t any mosquitoes that evening. Perhaps a breeze drove them all down to the south end of the harbor. A western workshirt over his fatigues and a six-pack in each hand, Tony introduced us to Sandy, a slim and friendly woman, with dark hair cut short. Wearing tan Bermudas and sandals, she held her new baby in a pink blanket against her blouse and reached over her to shake hands, firmly, with a warm smile. “It’s awfully nice of you boys to have us down here on the boat.”