Afloat (23 page)

With Trainer dead and thirty days until the Tippecanoe closes for business, it is not the same summer any longer. Rummy spotted the body bag early this morning, loaded onto a waiting Coast Guard boat, accompanied by two police officers. I can't imagine the island having a handy supply of body bags, but maybe the Coast Guard brought one on loan. From the mainland Trainer's body will be flown back to Ohio, back to the town he hated, to be buried there.

I ask Bryce why the flags on the island aren't at half-mast today.

‘Only for the islanders,' he says.

There is a long pause as we consider this – death necessitating a kind of class system, ensuring that those being mourned are at least familiar.

‘I guess otherwise they'd have to lower them for every tourist that has a heart attack,' he muses.

I shake my head. Velvet has taken down the work schedule with all of our names on it and made a new one, each of us getting more shifts. I look for his name when she puts it back up but of course it's not there. I wonder if she's worried about bad publicity.
This is the restaurant where that guy worked. The guy that died
.

The restaurant feels empty and large and I don't want to be here.

I am serving the executive members of the Consolidated Coalition of Michigan Hunters and Gun Owners tonight. Their party of sixteen has reserved most of the second floor of the restaurant, setting up displays and covering tables with brochures. Everyone seems more interested in drinking however, and I am running up and down the stairs, not caring, fetching Manhattans and then more bottles of wine with dinner. Outside, the lighthouse is obscured by wisps of fog, although its light blinks constantly.

It's getting darker earlier nowadays, and at seven o'clock the light outside is hazy and muted. This eerie time in between day and dusk makes me feel there will never be daylight again. A seagull drifts past the window, then turns towards the water.

I'm not concentrating and I make mistakes. The man who ordered the wine swirls it in his glass, holds it up to the light, sniffs it, sips and then nods. I want to bash him over the head with the bottle.

‘This is an excellent wine,' he says to the table.

‘Didn't you order the Cabernet?' one of the men asks.

We all look at the bottle, a Pinot Noir, and it is wrong. I have to bring them another one and if I'm lucky the bartender will void the first bottle without Velvet finding out. Fuck.
Pretentious gun-toting assholes
, I think, as I smile and present the Cabernet.

When they all close their menus, I return to the table once more. A large man, who reminds me of my dead uncle Manny, asks loudly what the vegetarian options are. As the men laugh he orders the one-pound Elk Pepper Steak with Water Chestnuts and Morel Mushrooms.

Bryce has offered to help me take drinks back and forth as his section is slow tonight, but what this has amounted to is him waiting by the bar so that once I've loaded the drinks onto my tray he can grab my ass. This is accompanied by a leer and a raising of his eyebrows, as if to ensure there will be more of this later on. I have to laugh, and it's strange how things can still be funny even after so much pain. After the fifth time he does this, Velvet appears at the bar and tells Bryce that as his section is slow tonight he might be interested in ironing some tablecloths for tomorrow's breakfast. He blows me a kiss and follows her clicking heels towards the kitchen.

The men upstairs are loud in the way that men are when they think they are alone with each other, when they've
got credit cards in their pockets, when they think the night is theirs. The conversation revolves around guns, ammunition, and hunting.

The table is long, half of the men sitting with their backs to the window and half of them facing it, and I am forced to reach awkwardly in between the men facing the window to pass drinks and food across. As I'm setting down their main course of elk steaks and filets and roast potatoes, some extra-rare and some well-done, one of the men with his back to me says to the group, ‘I bet this lady here's done some hunting in her day.'

Some of the men turn and look up at me, others continue looking at the man who has spoken. I smile and shake my head and he continues:

‘Sad state of affairs when these women don't know what it feels like to bag their first buck. Shit, when my daughter was twelve…'

He continues talking, picking up his fork and steak knife and sawing into the meat without looking at it. I back away from the table, sickened that these men can behave like this, eating steak, talking to me without bothering to read my nametag.

‘Hey, where'd she go? Where's the waitress?' He turns in his seat and calls me back to the table. ‘I'll have some more wine.'

Picking up the almost empty bottle from the table I pour too quickly, spilling a drop on the white tablecloth and some of the red runs down the stem. He makes a show of using his napkin to wipe his glass.

When they finally leave, they leave behind their brochures and pamphlets and their low-budget magazines. In the quiet of the upstairs, with the men gone and the table cleared except for the tablecloth and the square glass vase with the orchid in
it, with the lights dimmed and the night outside softened by the large white moon, I take a chance and sit down, out of sight of the swinging door leading downstairs. I feel that the word ‘waitress' is carved into the flesh of my forehead and even when this heals there will be a scar.

The magazine cover is a glossy collage of beasts, all of them behind a cross hairs. The deer are the most prominently featured, followed by bears, rabbits, coyotes, and raccoons. Everything is a target. The name of the organization is in an army green, and the Contents Page lists people who have written in about the benefits of one gun versus another, sharing personal hunting stories, and articles about the progress the NRA is making with its various lobbying initiatives. Someone has circled with red pen an ad for a gun show in Detroit this fall, and Derek from the town of Battlecreek writes:

There's nothing like the feeling you get when you see your first five-point buck dead in the snow with the white ground staining red as you approach, the steam rising from the bullet holes into the cold winter air.

Nothing is spelled ‘nthing' and the magazine is littered with grammatical errors.

The swinging door snaps open and inwards as Velvet arrives to ensure the room has been tidied properly. I stand up so quickly I become light headed, and realize I am about to cry. Upon seeing the mess left behind by their literature, she rolls her eyes and fetches a garbage bag. With one arm she efficiently sweeps everything off of the tables and into the trash.

‘Garbage,' she announces. ‘And I'd like to see you in my office before you leave tonight.'

She leaves the bag on the floor for me to carry down the stairs.

I am smiling at Velvet, sitting in her leather chair, waiting while she pours herself a glass of Belvedere from the carafe on her desk. I wonder if she keeps her vodka bottles hidden in the main freezer with the almond ice cream and frozen ‘fresh squeezed' juice. She takes a sip and places the tumbler on a black leather coaster. Her lipstick is minimal, leaving no mark on the glass. She doesn't offer me a drink.

‘I have something for you,' she says.

‘Oh?'

‘Have you heard of Petoskey?'

I want desperately to have heard of Petoskey, to appear intelligent and well-informed.

‘No, I don't think so.'

She expertly slides open a desk drawer, and leans over, looking for something. I look at the black leather picture frame on her desk that matches her coasters, but the picture is facing her and I can't see who it is. I can't think who it could be. The carpet beneath my feet is white.

She hands me a rock.

‘Petoskey stones are common in this area,' she says. ‘Look at it.'

I look immediately at the stone not wanting to appear uninterested, which I'm not as I really want to know what's going on. It's the size a stone should be, curved and round in the palm of my hand. It's been polished, all of it glossy as if it's been waxed.

‘Look at the pattern,' she instructs.

The dark gray is laced with fossil, thin slivers of line and tiny patterns like honeycomb. An intricate web, the stone is covered in these perfect shapes; it seems impossible there is so much organization within such a small surface. The colours look like explosions, dark black mouths in the center and then brown and creamy out towards the edge.

‘That's amazing,' I say.

Velvet nods.

‘It's fossilized coral. Michigan used to be an ocean.'

‘Thank you,' I say. ‘Where's it from?'

She smiles and rises from her chair.

‘Petoskey,' she says. ‘About an hour from here. Remember the orchid before you leave. You left it in the vase upstairs.'

I stand, leaving the office quickly.

‘And one more thing,' she calls, raising her voice after me.

I appear back in the doorway and she is still standing.

‘You might as well have this.'

She hands me the sixty-dollar bottle of Pinot Noir that I opened accidentally at dinner. The cork sits dark with sediment, upside down in the neck of the bottle.

‘I suggest you don't mention where it came from,' she says.

In the hall, my hands cold, I arrange the bottle carefully in my backpack making sure it's upright. On my way out of the restaurant I meet Rummy. He is indignant.

‘What the fuck? Why is she giving you things?'

‘Rummy, you fuck nut. I saw Trainer die.'

He is quiet for a moment.

‘So she gave you a rock?'

I have no explanation for him and when he asks to see it I refuse to show him.

Bryce and I follow the bottle of Pinot Noir with a case of Miller, and when I throw up everything comes out red like blood.

Anna's voice comes to me over the answer phone, projecting into space, suspended and intruding. I didn't hear the phone ringing.

Mother? Please pick up, it's Anna. I'm on my way, Mother, please don't worry. It's going to take a while, I've been interlodged at the Sushi Palace until it passes. I know your roof is okay but stay away from the windows, and remember your blue pills
.

She tells me to turn on the television, that the weather is getting worse, drifts of a couple feet reported north of the city, rain, then hail.

‘He'll come,' I say confidently to her. ‘Don't worry.'

The machine clicks.

Outside the living-room window the sky is heavy, and if the weather concerned me I would stand and watch the thick yellowish clouds building and swirling, my oak tree bending in the wind.
This too shall pass
, I say with satisfaction.

It's time for my blue pills, and I take them with cold tea, six hours old.

The day after Alan's funeral I arranged to rewrite my will. The Rising Cross Memorial Home is an unhealthy environment and I refused to become another customer of theirs, drained and refilled and carved up, unnatural slices in my skin releasing the gassy leftovers in my lungs, stomach, and bloodstream – unused air escaped and waiting around to be sucked up by the relatives who lasted longer than me. No. I will die with the scars I have now, and be burned with them as well.

Cremated, half of me will be spread thin over the top of Alan's grave, the other half dropped into a lonely, sacred place I have visited only once, but thought of many times since. Where my ashes will never touch the ground. Always falling, the legend says, towards the earth's center and the spirit that resides there. I'll always have direction, even in death.

Mother, the phone networks are cutting in and out now, I'd really feel better if I could talk to you before they go down. Can you hear me?

I'm sorry I'm talking to my mother, she's alone, yes. Just a minute.

Then louder.

Shit, Mother, the windshields on all the cars are going. They're taking us back into the kitchen.

She is shouting now.

Okay, please be careful. It's Anna.

The meeting with Father Aldo about the funeral arrangements had been tedious, involving questions about Alan's faith, my confirmation, Anna's upbringing. He had black hair and was younger than I thought he should be, thin, with black dress pants – lacking any sort of robe to give him the authority I wanted.

Knowing him only by sight from Christmas Mass, his old-fashioned conservatism was something I admired. His straight-from-the-scripture sermons reminded me of my youth – all those Sundays I spent learning bible verses and drawing eyelashes on my pet, Peter the Rock. Fundamentalism was nothing new for Catholicism, or any other religion for that matter – but to Father Aldo's frustration it seemed that given the choice, an increasing number of people were
choosing the right
, making the Mormon church the fastest growing religion in
the world in unexpected places like Brazil, Samoa, Tonga, Chile, Uruguay, and Mexico. Their membership records were disputed of course, how can you keep track of faith? I'd never seriously considered joining – when I prayed it was to Mary, and I told Father Aldo so. I didn't mention that she never listened.