And at night, on shore, I’d go to the dockside phone to call Marilyn, while gnats and moths crawled over the circular fluorescent light on the booth’s ceiling or darted at the corners of the glass. (Once in Aransas, Bob pretty much ceased to call, while I only really started then.) But only for a few less than half the calls, those evenings, was she home.
58.4. At least one reason I’d come down to work on the boats was because I was in the midst of a novel about a crew working on a spaceship, and I’d thought that by crewing here, I might pick up insights that could lend my book verisimilitude. What I’d learned, however, was that a three-man boat crew, on a dock where leisure meant drinking or fighting — and work meant there was no leisure at all — simply wasn’t a proper model for the family-like complement of fourteen to sixteen I’d envisioned for my story.
That evening’s trip to the dockside phone booth came a little early: the sky was deep blue over the water, with violet streaks slanting above the supermarket roof. What I poured out to Marilyn over the miles ran something like this: If I were home and was putting as much energy into my new book as I’d been putting into surviving here on the docks, I’d have something extraordinary. I knew it.
The desire to write my book was a palpable urge in my hands, in my head. … Yet there was no real way to work on it down here.
I saw less and less of Bob. Right now, while I was in, he was out. Elmer had let me go — fired me, actually (“Really, there ain’t nothin’ I can use you for, boy, right now.”) because of the seasickness. Firings were constant, offhand, and fairly impersonal along the docks — as were hirings and rehirings: men moved from deck to deck in a summer-long game of musical boats. I was getting ready to find a new one, but it seemed like a perverse misplacement of energies with my novel not a quarter completed in New York —
“I could send you a plane ticket,” Marilyn said.
I said: “You could?”
“Sure. Can you hang around the phone booth? I’ll call you back in about twenty minutes. Or, if somebody is using the phone down there, you call me …”
The next day Ron lent me some money.
Later that evening I walked up a few streets into town and got a room with stained, blue-flowered wallpaper, cigarette burns on the white-painted windowsill, an iron frame bedstead and the thinnest mattress I’ve every slept on, on the second floor of a rooming house that catered to the Aransas fisherman. The landlady had white hair, wire-framed glasses, and wore a sweater around her shoulders against the sweltering breeze the electric fan in the downstairs sitting room window managed to stir through the house. The rent was three dollars a night — this was the expensive rooming house, as the cheap one a block over (where rooms went for two-fifty) was full up.
My plan was to wait and see if Bob’s boat came in tomorrow in order to say good-bye — if not, I’d left messages with Ron, Jake, and the guy at the hamburger place, one of which would get to him. And I’d take off hitching for the Houston airport.
I put my guitar case in the corner, stretched out on the chenille spread, opened my copy of E Pluribus Unicorn and read:
… I shipped out with Kelley when I was a kid. Tankships, mostly coastwise: load somewhere in the oil country, New Orleans, Aransas Pass, Port Arthur, or some such — and unload at ports north of Hatteras. Eight days out, eighteen hours in, give or take a day or six hours … There were a lot of unusual things about Kelley, the way he looked, the way he moved; but most unusual about him was the way he thought. …
The next morning, I was leaving the breakfast place two buildings away. As I stepped off the porch, two two-seater Triumphs pulled up, and a blond guy about my age climbed over the side of one. He wore tan chinos, a shortsleeved white shirt, and white tennis shoes. Coming up on the porch, he asked, in an accent that bespoke middle-class Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, “Hey, do you know if they’ll take travelers’ checks in there? We’re looking for breakfast. How’s the food?”
“I just had some pretty decent sausages and eggs. Do you like hominy grits? As far as the check, though — ” I pointed across the street — “I think you’ll do better over there.”
The young man turned. A small bank building stood on the other side of the square.
He looked back at me and smiled, embarrassed at not having seen it.
I guess it was my own northern accent that made them stop to talk a while on their way back from cashing their check. His friend, in the other car, joined him in the conversation. Their names were something like Tommy and Timmy. Recently graduated from a midwestern university, they were passing through to visit relatives. The sportscars they drove were graduation presents — matched for the two university friends — from their fathers.
What about me? they wanted to know.
Well, I’d just finished up a stint working on the boats. Now I was planning to get to Houston to catch a plane back to New York.
They were heading for Houston, it seemed. We could give this guy a ride (Timmy asked Tommy), couldn’t we?
I guess so (Tommy told Timmy).
They’d go in and have breakfast, first, though.
I sat on a flaking white metal garden chair on the porch, took the paperback out of my pocket, and read another Sturgeon story. I was all set for them to come out and explain that, actually, on thinking it over, it would be a little difficult to take me along. …
The reservation they emerged from the screen door with, after praising the country breakfast, was, however, much simpler. They still had some stuff to do in the neighborhood. If I would be here at four o’clock, they’d pass back through and pick me up.
It sounded fine to me.
They drove off. Wondering if they were really going to come back, I went down to the docks again. Bob’s boat had gotten in about an hour ago. Bob was ambling up the piers looking for me. He’d already gotten two of my three messages.
“So you’re goin’ home and write your book?” he said. “That’s about the most sensible thing I heard outa you since we started off down here.”
“What about you?” I asked. About ten o’clock in the morning now, the dock had gotten notably warmer in the few minutes since we’d met.
“Joanne’s still up there, ain’t she?”
“Yeah. That’s what Marilyn said.”
“Then I’m stayin’ here. Don’t worry. I’ll be callin’ every time I’m in.”
We hung out together through a noon hamburger and a bottle of beer at the hamburger place where I’d gone in my first hour in Aransas. Before I left, behind it, we hugged each other, tightly — the most physically intimate we’d been since we’d left New York. Yet as Bob went off to find his captain (who wanted him to go someplace and pick up something or other and bring it back to the boat), I wondered why, without Marilyn here, I (and probably he) had missed that intimacy so little.
I went back to the rooming house. The landlady said I could stay in the room till three o’clock. I slept a while; then went down and sat out on the porch again to read one wonderful Sturgeon tale after another. My guitar case was stashed under the chair.
At ten to four, one Triumph followed the other around into the dusty square.
I was up and off the porch, the book now in my back pocket, my guitar case banging against my shin. It just made it into the boot of Timmy’s car. Tommy climbed back in without opening the door — so I did too.
The motor gave its high-performance thrumm and, with the wind whipping at Tommy’s (or Timmy’s) hair, we drove out through the shabby houses.
The plan, Timmy (or Tommy) explained to me, was this. We weren’t actually leaving for Houston till early the next morning. (As my plane wasn’t leaving till 7:30 the next night, I’d make it, they assured me, hours to spare.) Outside of Aransas there was an island — really an oversized sandbar. A few dirt-poor fishermen had once lived at one end. But that past year, a land development company (in which one of their uncles was a high-up executive) had bought the place, torn down the fishermen’s shacks, dug a canal through the island’s center, then built a series of luxury homes on either side. Each came with a swimming pool. Tributaries led off the central canal to the boathouse each home came with. Each house had its own two-story garage. Dow Chemical Company (a name familiar to me from their advertisements in the Scientific Americans that had arrived monthly for me throughout my childhood) was big in the area … owned the whole goddamned place, I’d heard the men working the docks say grumpily.