Afloat (17 page)

‘Honestly, Mackenzie Ray,' the mother says. ‘This dressing is bad for your skin.'

When I was much younger my mother would talk to me about ethics, without using the word exactly. On cross-country trips to Disneyland or Memphis we often made ourselves comfortable in small cities that looked nothing like St. Paul, but somehow felt familiar. Gas stations, pickup trucks, pavement, and bricks. Small parks with shit-covered statues of men in the center. Motels called Maple Lanes, Parkview, the Buena Vista, and the American Bed. Inside every motel was the same brown vending machine, with the standard selection of pork puffs and cheese bits and roast-beef sandwiches and gum. From one of these machines in South Carolina I once received two packages of Jelly Worms instead of one.

‘You can't keep that one, Bell,' my mother told me. ‘God will know you didn't pay for it.'

She made me return it to the front desk of our motel, and I'm sure the person I returned it to became the benefactor of my honesty, promptly eating it as soon as we left. But the
point was made. I was not allowed something for nothing. I was to pay for what I wanted.

The sun is now setting and outside the marina is full with end-of-August visitors, white yachts turning pink with diminishing light, flags flapping atop their masts. The lighthouse is bright. I've already made seventy dollars and it's not even eight o'clock. Bryce washed my bike this morning and it's shiny. Everything I could ever want has happened today. I don't even need a yesterday or a tomorrow when the island is so complete in each hour of its own perfection. Maybe after work I'll buy myself an ice cream. Or a pint.

A man arrives in deck shoes and a white linen shirt looking for his wife and daughter, his nose pink from sun or alcohol. I show him to table four and he slips me a bill which I slide into my apron, wondering at its denomination while he tells me he shot a seventy-two on the links this afternoon.

When I last spoke to my father, he answered the phone from his gardening shed. I could hear the sounds of birds.

‘Scorcher today,' he said.

‘What did they say?'

He paused, and the sound of a chickadee came down the wire.

‘Well, it's your mother versus the doctors and God,' he said. ‘I've no doubt who'll win.'

I imagined his large palms turned upwards as he shrugged.

‘No doubt at all,' he said.

Table thirteen calls me over. They would like a fresh white pillar candle; the woman raises her eyebrows disapprovingly as she points to a huge bluebottle struggling in the wax. I take the tainted candle into the back room where I use a knife
engraved with the words
THE TIPPECANOE
to lift the fly out. I try and wipe the poor thing clean, but soon the clear wax turns into a cloudy cocoon and I think how expensive hot wax treatments are at the salon on the island.

The fly dies, and I bring the woman a new candle.

I tell Rummy about it as we polish silverware later that night. I dip my muslin cloth gently into the hot vinegar and water solution, and pick up a knife.

‘A bluebottle?' he says.

‘I guess so, the big ones. Kind of shiny.'

‘
Calliphora Vomitoria
,' he says.

I sigh, while eliminating the water spots efficiently from the bowl of a spoon. We've got it down to one piece of silverware every three seconds.

‘What?'

‘It's their Latin name,' he says. ‘Vomitoria. Appropriate, eh?'

Trainer comes up behind Rummy holding a bucket of silverware still needing to be polished and says, ‘Jesus Christ,
Latin
? This is why you don't get laid.'

Rummy laughs and I can see the gums above his top teeth, but I wonder if he's thinking of Blue. He hasn't mentioned her since she left, but Rummy doesn't forget things easily. She was so tiny too, an entire person and spirit caught up in such a small amount of skin, holding the possibilities of babies within her when she left and making men remember her long after she was gone.

Trainer sets the bucket of silverware down with a crash.

‘
Arbeit Macht Frei
,' he says. ‘Let's hurry up and get to the bar.'

Trainer's ancestors were German and his grandmother won't let him wear his pink triangle button in her house. She is immune to his explanations of
the movement of marginalized
groups to reclaim negative symbols and language in order to subvert their original meanings
.

‘
Allons-nous
then,' Rummy says, picking up a fork.

‘Jesus Christ,' Trainer says again.

I wonder how I'll ever be able to leave this place.

Leaving the Cock after last call, I stand outside alone, preparing myself for the ping-pong tournament scheduled to begin in one hour. The dark expanse of the park to my left is quiet and filled with bare lilac bushes and the hollow black form of Jacques Marquette, the Jesuit priest. Standing alone on a concrete base in the center of the park, he is often found supervising Christian rallies, football games, locals, kids with cans of beer, Ultimate Frisbee matches, BMX competitions, late-night lovers – all this he does solemn and steadfast, covered in the thick white mess of seagulls. The guidebooks say he discovered the Mississippi river – after the Spanish, and after the two million or so Sioux, Algonquin and Ojibwa who lived along its banks I suppose.

At home the river flows brown and polluted.

Bryce told me Marquette went on missions as far away as Montréal, where the diaries of his extensive travels were lost after his canoe overturned in the rapids of the St. Lawrence. Therefore, he told me, little is known of his personal life except that he had an ear for languages and spoke exceptional Huron.

‘And you want to be an
electrician
?' I said.

Bryce joins me now on the front step of the Cock. Across from us, the two stories of the Tippecanoe are luminous and white with moonlight. A taxi clips by with harnesses jangling, one black horse, one brown, heading down Main Street filled with dock porters, servers, and housekeepers from other restaurants and hotels, everyone loud and paired with their respective late-night conquests. An islander named Richard or
Roy rides past confidently on his battered Schwinn at a pace that suggests he is out for a leisurely bike ride, despite the fact that it's three a.m. A regular for lunch at the Tippecanoe, he always orders three lemons with his mineral water and tips twenty dollars, regardless of the bill.

Bryce gives him a wave.

‘Roy was in Korea,' he says.

Roy's figure recedes into the night – his slow pedaling carrying him away, although it seems to me now the shadows are behind him, and not in front.

‘When he can't sleep he rides around the island,' Bryce tells me. ‘On late-night patrol.'

Bryce then mentions he'd like to join the army maybe, be a soldier himself. I don't respond. Our own bikes parked around the corner on Fort Street have been knocked down in a twisted show of turned wheels and scraped handlebars, pedals from one bike stuck in the spokes of another.

‘Drunk driver,' nods Trainer, joining us. ‘Disgusting.'

He swings a leg over a bicycle which is not his own, and continues:

‘You'd think the police would do something.'

We begin to separate them. I pull mine upright and flip the kickstand down while everyone else files out the front door, discussing the upcoming event at Mackinac Pines.

‘Judgment day,' someone says.

Bryce points at Rummy as he stumbles out the door:

‘We'll show you how it's done here in the U S of
A
.'

‘Wait,' says Tom. ‘Are we allowing girls?'

Despite Tom's generosity in giving me his old bike earlier this summer, he is the sort of person I have subsequently avoided talking to as much as possible: thirty-two years old, a rumored dishonorable discharge from the Marines, and nothing but plaid flannel shirts and odd comments. Tom has a
photograph in his apartment of his aunt who passed away a year ago. She is posed and graying in a gold frame, and when he has had too much whisky he will bring the photo with him on late-night walks.
She was my aunt Ava
. He will talk about his aunt and show the picture and apparently everyone has seen it. We have all agreed that while Tom may be from Iowa and close with his family, this habit is still strange, and he has taken to drinking in his room by himself a lot.

‘Of course girls are allowed,' Bryce says, patting my head condescendingly. ‘So long as they're topless.'

He moves to reach his hand up my shirt and I drop my bike, wrestling with him, trying to stomp on his instep until I manage to pull him over. We smack painfully onto the pavement, laughing.

‘She's crushing me!' he yells.

‘Lovely,' says Trainer, from astride his locked bike. ‘Mature love, what an inspiration.'

‘I'll see you all at the tournament,' John says from the door of the Cock.

Tom looks suddenly bored. ‘I wish the island had a strip club,' he says.

An employee games room has been created out of the old Pine Suites office. It is a small awkward space, the standard pink carpet etched with golden beer stains. The room is just large enough for a faded dartboard hanging above the front desk, eight board games, and a ping-pong table, which has become the center of a never-ending tournament among the few male wait staff. Tonight and every other night, behind the door that still says ‘office', they make bets, drink, and engage in the sort of behavior they have probably read about in magazines or senators' biographies; one night involved Cuban cigars, and has been rated one of the top three island
evenings thus far. The winners are recorded on a wall chalkboard, and only the designated scorekeeper is allowed to touch the chalk.

Bryce and Rummy face one another across the table, which has been duct-taped in the middle. I'm not sure how exactly it broke, as no one will own up to being a participant in the
how many people will the table hold
experiment. Tom holds the chalk, Trainer throws the only dart supplied with the dartboard, and Brenna sits on the edge of the office desk, leaning forward, looking like she's ready to start waving pompoms. John's lanky form arrives with more beer, the evil clown tattoo on his calf always surprising when I see him outside of work. He and Trainer take turns throwing the dart. I stand near the door, smelling the wet sweat of competition and hot beer and wondering how the month of August can seem so long and contain so much.

Bryce gives the ball a practice bounce, blows on it, then rubs it on his polo shirt.

‘It's okay, Rummy,' he says. ‘I'll start off slow so you can get the hang of it. Don't feel bad when you lose.'

Bryce's first serve misses the table.

‘Let's go, Bryce,' Brenna calls, clapping her hands.

Cheerleading is a sport involving dedication and fitness, and our high-school trophy case was full of golden figures in tights balancing atop wooden pillars – but whatever female genetic code may be responsible for instigating excitement at men's physical competition is not one I am in possession of.

My own family, apart from my father's 1974 bowling trophy, is sadly lacking in golden statues, the kind of sporting legacy one leaves to their children. There was never anyone cheering us on from the sidelines and so it seems we are losing the competition slowly, to everyone else – the object to be the lucky ones without tragedy.

Needing space, I step outside and there is the island moon again, making the pine trees look black. Outside my apartment, number eight, I notice someone has left flowers as they occasionally do. A tribute by the island tourists who are not interested in fudge and romance, but axe-murderers and the real history of the human race that doesn't involve the noble discovery of land or rivers. The bouquet, upon closer investigation, is made up of pink carnations and some baby's breath. Sold by Mackinac Mart for eighteen dollars. I have never seen anyone delivering their offering, and upon discovery I usually put them in water. I might still tomorrow morning. Standing above the dampening cone of paper, I wonder when they come out – the ghosts – the remnants of the vacationing family chopped up by their father. It's easy to suppose they're here, wanting to remind everyone left to never feel safe, not even when you're surrounded by water. I wonder where exactly he swung first, if he aimed for the head or neck or if the first blow had been buried into abdomens, if there had been any second thoughts.

A moth hits the back of my head, its thick body heavy and its wings loud.

‘Hey, ding-dong, show some support for your man in here!' Tom yells out of the office door.

I hear Trainer's voice over the shouting and the hollow smack of the ball hitting the paddles.

‘I've been meaning to ask you, Tom, where
do
you get all your great flannel?'

Stepping away from the light I walk out into the trees. Eyes closed, I keep my arms before me in a cross, flexed against the branches. Pine needles touch my legs and skin, my arms held out in protection, my weight breaking the undergrowth beneath me. An animal crashes away from my approach, and
after three steps I start to squint but pretend it still counts. I do not run into anything.

Dropping my arms, I stand in the dark, wanting a ghost, deserving one. There are crickets, there is wind, and possibility. But they won't come because I don't know their names. Perhaps they were called something thoughtful like Edward or Lily, after grandparents. Or something modern and genderless – Taylor, Alex. Their last name was Mc something. Something Scottish sounding. Bryce said they were sleeping. I imagine the axe thunking into the flesh of them, all the effort of learning proper manners and shoelace tying come to nothing, just a body full of blood let out all over the sheets.

It seems the closer I come to leaving here, the more registration letters and residence information from St. Kat's I receive, the more history and the past descend upon me, undeterred by my island hideaway. For now, the letters are folded, and ignored. I will return soon, to learn about the world and examine the blood stains on the soil of each country, but the island comes first.