Walter left the window down. Snow drifted in to melt against the side of his face. It was warm, really it was. He was wondering how it could possibly be snowing when it was so balmy, when he heard a yell from behind and hit the accelerator. The car went up the hump, hesitated, and then a new impetus from the rear put it over the top and he was sailing out across the lot. He didn’t stop till he’d reached the far side, all the way across, under the lowering cover of the trees. When he climbed out, his benefactors were gone.
He still didn’t know why he’d come, or what he was going to do, but he thought for starters he’d maybe just cross the lot and poke his head in at the tent. He wasn’t sure Jessica would be there, but he knew she and Tom were really into this sloop thing — that much she’d told him herself — and he guessed she would be. Tom too, of course. Maybe he’d just have a beer, hang out in the back. He didn’t really want to talk to her — not after what had happened in the cabin. But a beer. Maybe he’d just have a beer.
Easier said than done.
The going was tough — as tough as it had been in Barrow, though not as icy — and he went down twice on his knees before he reached the railway platform. His jacket — wool blend, black and gray herringbone, one hundred and twenty-five bucks — was wet through already, ruined no doubt, and the tie had tightened like a noose around his neck. He began to regret not going back for his coat. For a long moment he stood hunched on the platform, sucking at the gash between his knuckles. Then he drifted off toward the music.
He was shivering by the time he ducked inside, and despite himself, he made his way toward the nearest of the heaters. He was surprised at how many people had turned out — a couple of hundred, at least. There looked to be half that many out on the dance floor alone — four big double rows of square dancers, going at it like refugees from the harvest hoedown in Hog’s Back, Tennessee. The beer was good — Schaeffer, on tap — but after his eating attack Walter felt filled up right to the back of his throat and he could only sip at it. He didn’t recognize a single face in the crowd.
He was still wondering what he was doing there and beginning to feel less than inconspicuous in his short hair, sports coat and tie, when he caught a glimpse of Jessica. She was out on the dance floor, in the middle of the throng, swinging from somebody’s arm, he couldn’t see whose. Wedging his way between a pair of middle-aged characters with white ponytails and mustard-colored sweatshirts that featured reproductions of the Arcadia listing beneath the swell of their middle-aged bellies, he got a better look. She was wearing an old-fashioned calico dress with ruffles and peaked shoulders, her hair was in braids and there was a smile of pure pleasure on her lips. He didn’t recognize the guy she was dancing with, but it wasn’t Tom Crane. He fell back away from the heater and into the shadows, suddenly agitated. He felt his face twist up and he flung his beer violently to the ground. The next minute he was outside again.
The snow seemed heavier now and a wind had come up to make it dance and drift. It seemed colder too. Walter crossed in front of the tent and made his way into a deep fold of shadow behind the duplex that fronted the street. There he propped himself up against the wall, lit a cigarette with hands that had already begun to tremble and watched. He watched the party wind down and begin to break up. He watched people slap backs, gesture at the sky, heard them call out to one another in hearty, beery voices, watched them troop off, heads bowed, toward the cars parked along the street and in the commuter lot beyond it. He watched an elderly couple in matching London Fog raincoats hump up the hill past him and he watched Tom Crane, gangling like a great pinched spider, his denim jacket so sodden it practically pulled him down, stagger through the mob and into the tent. He watched Mardi too — leaving with a guy in serape, boots and sombrero who looked as if he were on his way to a costume party. He watched all this, and still he didn’t know why he’d come. Then Will Connell was singing “We Shall Overcome,” cars were cranking over like the start of the Grand Prix, and Tom and Jessica, arms entwined, sauntered out of the tent.
Like lovers.
Like lovers in a dream.
Walter watched as they turned away from the crowd and made their way toward the dock — and the sloop. And then he understood: they had the romance of the storm, the romance of the do-gooders and marshwort preservers, of the longhairs and other-cheek turners, the romance of peace and brotherhood and equality, and they were taking their weary righteous souls to bed in the romance of the sloop. All at once he knew why he’d come. All at once he knew.
It took them an hour to settle down. At least. Equipment loaders, garbage haulers, stragglers and kibitzers, all of them milling around the front of the tent as if they’d just stepped out of an Off-Broadway theater. Walter, chilled through now, fumbled his way back to the MG — the snow so furious he could barely find it — to huddle over the heater and give them time. He smoked. Listened to the radio. Felt the jacket pinch around his shoulders and pull back from his wrists as the moisture began to steam out of it. An hour. The windshield was gone, his footprints erased. He concentrated on the eerie spatulate light of the station and crossed the lot for the third time that night.
The ship was dark, the marina deserted. He stood there on the snow-covered dock, breathing hard, the musty, damp, polluted breath of the river in his face, the sloop rising above him like an ancient presence, like some privateer dredged up from the bottom, like some ghost ship. Creaking, whispering, moaning with a hundred tongues, she rode out away from the dock on the pull of the flood tide, and the dock moaned with her. Three lines held her. Three lines, that was all. One aft, one amidships, one at the stern. Three lines, looped over the pilings. Walter was no stranger to boats, to cleats and half-hitches and the dark tug of the river. He knew what he was doing. He rubbed his hands together to work the stiffness out of them, and then he reached for the stern line.
“I wouldn’t do it, Walter,” sang a voice behind him.
He didn’t even have to turn around. “Go home, gram,” he whispered. “Leave me alone.”
“It’s in the bones,” his father said, and there he was, big-headed and crude, the snow screening his face like a muffler. He was bent over the piling amidships, tugging at the line.
“Leave it!” Walter shouted, startled by the sound of his own voice, and he stalked up the dock and right through the old man as if he weren’t there. “Leave it,” he muttered, clomping around the piling like a puppet on a string, “this is for me to do, this is for me.” He lifted his hand to his mouth, sucked at the dark blood frozen to his knuckles. And then, in a rage, he jerked the line from the piling and dropped it in the river.
He straightened up. Laughter. He heard laughter. Were they laughing at him, was that it? His mouth hardened. He squinted into the driving snow. Up ahead, in the shadows, he saw movement, a scurry of pathetic little legs and deformed feet, dwarfish hands fussing over the aft line. There was a splash, muted by the snow and the distance, and then the sloop swung free like the needle of a compass until it fixed on the open river, held now only by the single rigid line at its stern.
It took him a moment. A long moment. He moved back down the dock and stood there over that last frail line, and the line became a ribbon, the bow on a little pony Parilla motorbike, just tug it — tug it once — and it falls free. He jerked his head around. Nothing. No father, no grandmother, no ghosts. Only snow. What had he wanted — to go aboard, climb into the bunk with them, save the marshwort and become a good guy, an idealist, one of the true and unwavering? Is that what it was? The thought was so bitter he laughed aloud. Then he pulled the ribbon.