Jack was lonely, of course, in the sense of longing for the comforting touch of a woman. But though he dreamed of it, he considered himself still hopelessly unworthy. He had not been with a female since his year at the community college, when his entanglement with a girl named Debbi DiCiccio propelled him into the disgusting circus of her troubled relatives, with their addictions, hatreds, jealousies, morbid interests, evil motives, and illnesses. It ended one night when Debbi, high on weed and painkillers, smacked him with the butt end of a pool cue for casually saying her uncle Matt was a child molester, which was just a statement of fact, because he had been in Comstock prison for four years. She was the first real girlfriend he ever had and the liberty of her body was like being let into the Garden of Eden to him, but he was afraid she might kill him next time. Since then, with the college shut down, and all the other touchstones of normality now things of the past, his day-to-day life had been too desperate and miserable for even the thought of romance. There was something fundamentally unromantic about the world falling apart all around him, and himself with it. Now, things were changing inside of him and around him.
Several women around town began to excite his interest. There was the dark-eyed beauty who ran the New Faith haberdash on Main Street, the place Andrew had taken Jack just after Christmas to show him how a man was measured and fitted for new trousers and shirts. Sister Annabelle had a magnetic glow that amazed and baffled him. He wondered which of the New Faith men he saw about town was fortunate to keep company with her. He had heard tales about the living arrangements at the New Faith compound—that a certain freedom of liaison prevailed among them—and he sometimes wondered what it might be like to go over to them, surrender to their manners, their ways, and their religion, and get swept up in the musky raptures of free love. But Jack had bad memories of a church his mother had taken him to in the old times, in a building that looked like a muffler shop on a highway of strip malls with wig shops and manicure parlors. In that threadbare church people had fits in the aisles and the preacher seemed like a crazy person even to a five-year-old child. Besides, he reckoned his position in Andrew Pendergast’s house was altogether a better deal than a perpetual orgy with people high on Jesus.
About town with Andrew, he saw women of various ages with good figures, laughing eyes, ringing voices, wise faces, and he imagined them filled with feminine bounteousness, like the way the landscape was in October, giving forth all its fruits and nutriments, a natural abundance of what life required. He was beginning to wonder whether what Andrew told him about the generosity of the universe might be true, and if he might be as much a party to it as anyone else. He was growing sleepy again, having worked out in his mind what he needed to work out at the end of a long busy day, and as he fell down the slippery hill of dreams his last conscious thought was of gratitude that another long and busy day would surely follow.
T
HIRTY-FIVE
“Maybe you should rest now,” Britney said as Daniel finished the mug of warm milk and whiskey he’d asked for.
“No,” he said. “I have to tell them what happened to Evan.”
Loren and Jane Ann remained nervously alert in their comfortable seats. Robert put another log in the woodstove. Britney told Sarah it was time to go to bed. She refused.
“No, I want to listen,” Sarah said. Britney did not want to start a quarrel. She replaced two candles that were burning down to stubs and invited Sarah to snuggle close to her on the sofa. Loren poured himself another whiskey.
“Please go on,” Jane Ann said.
Daniel’s Story: Adrift on the Inland Sea
It was a beautiful peaceful morning and the next week and a half was the most beautiful time . . . ever. We woke up on the boat. Evan didn’t feel very good. He had a nasty-looking scab on his lip where he split it the night before falling into the boat. We were both awfully hungry. One of the things I’d forgotten to buy in my haste to gather up supplies before leaving Buffalo was cooking utensils. I had alcohol for the little galley stove but nothing to cook any of our food in, and I wasn’t too keen for raw bacon and potatoes. The bucket I’d bought was a plastic one from the old times. Couldn’t cook in that. The only thing that might serve for cookery was the steel toilet pan. So I scooped some sand and gravel off the lake bottom and scrubbed that toilet pan and ended up frying our bacon and potatoes and onions in it, and it was the best meal we ever ate. After that, Evan felt better. I showed him around the boat and explained how things worked and he began to see what a good boat she was and how we would have a career carrying cargoes about the lake for the summer, or until we got sick of it, or found a better situation somewhere. But the big thing was that we were free and out of danger and on our own, and when we hoisted the anchor and raised the sails our spirits flew.
Evan took the wheel and I studied the charts Fourier sold me. We had a compass built into the pilot station and it was easy to understand where we were as long as we weren’t out of sight of land. There were no natural harbors along the lakeshore for many miles and few signs of life. We coasted off it all morning in a fair breeze coming in from the southwest. Evan knew some things that I didn’t about sailing a boat—how you could move forward even sailing partly into the wind because of the way the air flowed over the sail and the air pressure on each side. It was physics, he said. I wasn’t any good at math and physics but Evan was a whiz. He mastered the operation of the boat that first day and taught me things I didn’t know.
The weather was perfect. It was even getting hot, being June. We stopped wherever we liked that first day. The
Kerry McKinney
had a very shallow draft. We could raise the leeboards and bring her in close to shore, drop the anchor, and wade onto the land carrying our boots. We could swim or lie about, or read our books, or sleep. When we felt like it, we moved on. We passed little towns that seemed uninhabited, an old state park with pavilions overgrown with Virginia creeper, crumbling factories, abandoned rail yards. There were occasional orchards and farms along the shore, some raggedy, some better-looking. We stopped at one late that first afternoon. It was a big, handsome old house in the Greek temple style of the long ago times of early America, like the machine age never happened. There were people working about the place, well clothed and healthy-looking, good fenced pastures with horses and oxen, fields planted far to the horizon, workshops and outbuildings, a smith banging away in one of them.
We went to the kitchen door of the big house and asked to trade for a fry pan and a pot and some spoons and forks and a flipper and like that. The cook must have been making supper. It was quite hot in there. She had pots simmering on a big stove. She was a good-looking old girl, forty or so, substantial in the right places, with a gypsy-looking head rag on, and she was a little flirty with us. She had two helpers, both younger, both homely, one with a pushed-together face and kinky red hair and the other quite fat. She said she doubted we had anything worthwhile to trade. I said we had silver and could pay in hard money. That perked her up. We bargained and got what we needed, plus a loaf of real wheat bread, a sack of cornmeal, two dozen eggs, more onions, and some oat cookies. She asked who we were and how we came into a pocket full of silver. Evan said that we were pirates. It was one of his jokes, but I could see it didn’t sit so well with the girls. The cook said that was a dangerous career and perhaps we might not want to keep at it. She said that her farmer boss was looking for strong young men and was a good provider. Evan said, no thank you, we liked being pirates out on the Great Lakes. She said we would probably get ourself hanged inside a year. I asked if the people out on the property worked on the indenture and she said no, she didn’t even know what it meant, and all were free to come and go, but there was no better situation in western New York than Miller’s farm, which was famous in the region. I took it that Miller was a grandee like our Mr. Bullock. She had never had a better life, she said. In the old times, she worked for a company that had a thousand restaurants all over the country, all the same, and all they did was heat up food that was made far far away and came frozen in trucks. She said the new times was the best thing that ever happened to her and Miller’s farm the best place, and if we got tired of being pirates we should come back there and sign on for honest work. She was a jolly spirit. I suspect she had a free hand with the cider in that kitchen too. She said we could both kiss her before we left because she had never been kissed by pirates before.
When we got back to the boat I had to lecture Evan about shooting his mouth off like that and he said I had no sense of humor. I said no, he just had no sense, period, as in common sense, telling people we were pirates. For all I knew there were pirates out in the lakes just like there were pickers all over the land, and I hoped we didn’t encounter any because they would have no reason not to leave us for dead after stealing our money. But apart from that little upset, the period that followed was a dreamtime. We had fine weather, day after day of bright sun and cool, still nights. We turned brown basking through the long days as we followed the shore and stopped and swam and ate. Evan suggested that we try crossing Lake Erie to the Canadian side, to see how things had gone in that country, but I wasn’t ready to sail out of sight of land yet. Those lakes are like little oceans. It was a good forty miles across to Canada where we were and you couldn’t see across. A few times, a wind came up and the water got rough, quickly, and forced you to be respectful of it. I didn’t want to be caught out there at night, unable to get to dry land if necessary.
We broke out the fishing lines and easily found bait ashore under rotten logs and down in the leaf litter and brought it back and fished off the boat at evening time when the lake grew still. At first we hooked the common bass and perch that we knew from the ponds back home. But for really great eating we discovered another fish I was not acquainted with. It wasn’t any kind of a trout or a salmon but looked like a stretched-out bass, yellowish brown colored, with a dorsal fin like a sail. I later learned it was a walleye. We called it the golden snapper. It was superior to the others, which we threw back. We weren’t out deep enough to get lake trout, if they were in there at all. We’d roll the fillets in cornmeal and fry them in bacon fat. Often, we made supper on shore over a wood fire if there was a pretty little beach. We had pancakes and jam for dessert and took turns reading out loud from
Moby-Dick
until it was too dark to see the page, and then we’d wade back to our bunks aboard the
Kerry McKinney
and sleep to the gentle rocking of the little waves. It was a glorious time. Nobody bothered us. After a while we stopped worrying about being followed over what happened way back in Lockport. We also developed a plan to sail clear up through the lakes, past Detroit, up into Huron and around the Mackinac Straits. From the charts, it looked like you had to go through a set of locks to get into Lake Superior. But I didn’t think we’d go that far in one summer, or know what we would do when winter came on, or whether we’d keep on sailing the lakes more than one season. Evan had some idea about sailing as far as Chicago and going west from there to the Pacific Ocean, where Lewis and Clark went—he knew all about them, and I didn’t, except that they were famous Americans of long ago—only now if you went all the way to the Pacific Ocean, Evan said, there would be Americans there, whereas Lewis and Clark met up only with Indians. Well, I wasn’t confident that things were going so great out on the West Coast since the bombing of Los Angeles, but it gave us a lot to talk about, making plans and all by the campfire.
After five days, we were running low on supplies again and we came upon a town with an excellent harbor. It turned out to be Erie, Pennsylvania—we’d made it out of New York State! It had a great big hook of a sand spit with woods on it that sheltered a bay a good mile across. We sailed in and found the public dock. A harbor master was on duty to keep order there, which was reassuring. Like other cities we visited, Erie was well reduced from its former glory of the machine age, with many blocks of abandoned buildings and houses and old factories and a population pared down by sickness and hardship. But down around the harbor they had built new buildings for warehouses and dealers in goods and they had a lively trade going on. We bought new clothes there, and straw hats, and more bacon and a nice ham and some Ashtabula whiskey, a deck of cards, a pound of taffy, and two fishing rods made in the old times, with good line, and they had a bathhouse on Short Street where we got cleaned and shaved, and then we went out for supper at the Star Hotel overlooking the harbor and had beefsteaks with spring greens and good crusty wheat bread and learned the news of the day, which was the first we heard of the Foxfire Republic.
Some enterprising person had put out a newspaper there, of the style from the far-back old times where all the stories and advertising were crammed on two sides of what was called a broadsheet. I guess paper was in short supply, like so many other things. But I was most taken by it and thought wherever fate led me I might someday like to run a broadsheet newspaper like that if I got sick of sailing around on a boat.
The Foxfire Republic was a new nation broken away from the USA composed of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Arkansas and Missouri and the southern part of Illinois. It was led by a woman president who was a famous roustabout for Jesus on TV and, before that, a star of country music recordings before she turned politician. This Foxfire Republic was engaged in hostilities with another new nation of former states that called itself New Africa, or
Uhuruwardi,
which was Swahili for land of freedom, the paper said. That country was made of Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and the two new nations had sorted themselves out just like it sounds, between the white and black races, which is how come we encountered so few people of color anywhere we’d been since leaving home. Texas had apparently gone its own way for a while, with Oklahoma for a sidekick, but was now fighting off a takeover by Mexico. Then there was the country still called the United States, which I concluded was made up of whatever else might be left over, with the government most recently located in St. Paul, Minnesota, because of what happened in Washington, and rumors of yet another move of the capital elsewhere. We talked to various men in the barroom before supper about these new developments and they didn’t know much else about the fate of the nations besides what was in the paper, or what was going on in the Pacific coast states, or the Rocky Mountains, for that matter. People were not journeying far between the regions unconnected by rivers or the Great Lakes because there were no cars, railroads, or airplanes anymore.