The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay (7 page)

Barker, when he saw Clay, stood and bear-hugged him, slapping him on the back and praising their day's work. Byron started to rise but lost his balance and sat back down as Barker spoke.

“Damn if we didn't shine out there, boys. Goddamn! Close one though. Near foolish, I must say.”

“We were lucky,” Pal said.

“Luck? Shit, Pal! That was sheer miracle, boy!”

“I still can't believe you jumped in.”

“I sure as hell didn't plan to, but I figured you boys had some muscle. Might as well have brought Missy over there as you boys.”

Barker grinned and called to Missy to come over.

“Yes, honey?” she mocked.

“Come here, girl.”

She sauntered over and, pausing, cracked a bubble from the gum she was chewing.

“You want another round, boys?” she said, ignoring Barker.

“Missy, these boys want to feel your muscles.”

“Right.” She turned to go.

“Missy darling.” Barker's tone apologized. “Hold on a minute. Just kidding.” He put his arm around her. She made a pretense of shrugging it off but let him keep it there.

“We do want another round. And I want dinner for my friend here. He's an artist.”

“Yeah?”

“Truly. What you want, Clay?”

“I'll take a cheeseburger. Make it two. Fries, apple pie. Bud. No salad. Thanks.”

“Burgers for my friend, Missy. And let me tell you something.” Barker leaned into Missy's ear in a conspiratorial way, winking at Clay. “You know they say boats are like women? Well, you oughtta see this boy work a boat.”

This time she was successful in throwing his arm off her shoulders.

“I'm putting you on probation if you don't watch it, Barker.”

People began drifting in, filling up the aisle of the back room, which ran long and narrow to an oval dance floor, where a disc jockey was setting up his records. The back bar was built along one side, and across the aisle were the booths that ran along the other. The booth seats were a red Naugahyde patterned with cigarette burns. Byron and Pal between them knew half the people who ambled by. Pal tried to talk to every female; Byron would just raise his
hand in a silent salute. Clay's food arrived with a smile from Missy. More beers were ordered. Byron ordered shots of Jack Daniel's. The disc jockey started turning records. Laura-Dez showed up and said hello to everyone. She saw Byron and his condition and declined to sit, but with Clay's help she coaxed Byron up and out while he could still walk.

In the din, after beers and tequila shooters bought by Barker, Clay ended up talking and laughing and finally dancing a slow dance with Paula Firth, the waitress from his lunch with Bertha. He bought her several rum drinks and danced with her again. Her voice was deep as she talked in his ear, and with her arms around his waist, she began to move against him to the music. He smelled her sweat, her earthy scent, and felt her sigh deeply, her body gradually surrendering against his. They danced, finished dancing, waited for the music, and danced again. He bought her another drink and told her she smelled delicious and that her crab cake had been good too. He asked her if she would like to leave with him and she said yes. They drove together out to the old ferry dock and parked and began to kiss. Clay studied her face, which seemed to capture all of the light in the half-moon sky, and kissed her again. Paula let him unbutton her cowboy shirt slowly and part it, and she looked at him and never said a word. She held his head in her hands as he kissed her breasts and belly and then unzipped and pulled off her skirt. Clay took off all of her clothes and then his as well because he wanted to feel her completely against and around him and was lost with her and afraid only that she would tell him to stop. When they were finished, they lay tangled together for a long while, listening to the radio play country songs. Clay felt grateful. He wasn't quite sure how it happened or even who this was that he was with. He asked her if she might like to go to the truck stop and have breakfast, but she said that she had to work in the morning and needed to get home. She kissed him on the cheek and started looking for her clothes. They helped each other dress,
and then he started the engine and drove her back to her car. Before she left, Clay thanked her, and she looked at him as though he were strange. He then told her that he had to go back to college for a week or two, to arrange some things, but would like to see her again when he got home. She said sure, to call her if he felt like it. Then she told him he was sweet, and she got out.

Clay watched her until she had started her car and was pulling out of the lot. Then he turned and headed down the highway for the farmhouse.

The next day, Saturday, he tried to call Paula but got no answer. Byron was nowhere around, either, so he left him a note. He drove to town and went by the restaurant where Paula worked but was told she was off. It had started to rain.

He stopped off at Bertha's to say good-bye. She started to cry. He held her hands and talked to her for a while. He fixed her a cup of tea. She told him she wanted him to go but that for her his departure seemed a breaking off. He told her that it seemed that way for him as well.

They sat in silence for a while, listening to the rain against the windows. Finally, when it felt right, he kissed her on the cheek and left. In the rain and fog he drove down Route 50 toward the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, alone, watching the corroded wipers on his windshield smear the water back and forth.

The place where he slept, near the University of Maryland campus in Baltimore, was next to the railroad track. Though it came by several times a day, he had already stopped hearing the train sometime before. He subleased a small back room from a graduate student who was constantly stoned and who kept his rent money and seldom paid the landlord. Every week or so the landlord would come by and beat on the door, hollering, and the graduate student would haul out the back window and down the fire escape.

It was a five-minute drive to class, but he could never find a place to park, so he usually walked. He cut through a maze of fast-food parking lots, then walked adjacent to the boulevard and by the time he got to class felt stained from the smell of grease and the soot and smoke of the traffic. Before the news of his father, he had worked three afternoons a week at a checkout counter at Safeway. At night he would study. Sometimes after studying he would go to the corner diner and order the ham and cheese omelette with coffee. From the diner he could hear the music from the strip of bars, and after eating he would walk by them and sometimes go inside
and stand by himself amid the jostling crowds, pulsing beat, and drugs and beer to watch the girls dancing.

Adjusting to college in Washington, D.C., had been difficult the first time. But at Georgetown he had found Matty and Kate, or they had found him. Making other friends followed, and he had gradually begun to enjoy the city. When the bank first garnisheed Pappy's accounts, he had transferred to the less expensive state college in Baltimore, and there he'd found things harder. After class he would sometimes cross the parking lots behind the mall and walk into the strip of trees, sit on the pine needles with his back against the resined bark, and study the light in the leaves. He would close his eyes to shut out the congestion he felt around him. Sometimes he'd sit through the receding of the light from dusk to dark.

He spoke regularly with Kate on the telephone though, and Matty also, and their kindness helped sustain him. Kate was from the Washington suburbs and had all the latest gossip, news on the school, their classmates, on the city, anything. Sometimes she sent Clay records of a particular piano recording she had discovered and wanted him to hear. Even though she knew why Clay had needed to transfer, Kate liked to try to cajole him into coming back. She even offered to lend him the money, laughing, as though it were a trifle. She told Clay jokes over the phone and would laugh at her own stories. Occasionally she would put the phone on the piano top and play for him. The pieces she chose were always lyrical, adagio: Prokofiev, Chopin.

He had returned to campus to salvage the winter semester, which ended the first week of April because the school was experimenting with a new five-week spring minisession. Though exams had never been difficult for him, the classes he had missed required some effort to make up, and his decision had left him distracted and with little motivation for studying. Still, he finished his tests, then went to the registrar's office and signed the necessary
papers for his leave of absence. Back at his room by the railroad tracks, his few belongings were already packed—clothes mostly, some record albums, and a secondhand stereo. Now, for some reason, he heard the train. One last time, he thought. He picked up the phone and called Matty and told him his decision and plan. Matty didn't seem to approve. They had a long discussion. Kate got on the phone after. She listened without saying anything as he told her he needed to make this change. She said she wanted him to do it too. She told him that she was learning that people needed to follow what they felt in their bones.

Leaving the campus, he drove out of the city to the beltway and around toward Annapolis. There was little traffic. He turned on the radio and listened to the news for a while. President Nixon was returning from California. McGovern and Humphrey were battling it out in the Democratic primaries. The Paris peace talks had stalled again. The negotiators were at odds over the shape of the bargaining table. He changed the channel and listened to Country Joe and the Fish singing “one, two, three, what are we fighting for . . .” The news came back on and he turned off the radio and started thinking about all he had to do to get ready. The day was cold and clear. Driving over the Bay Bridge, he could see south past Thomas Point to the West River, and north past the Magothy to Gibson Island and beyond, where the horizon met the sky in a thin stream of silver vapor. A single oyster dredger moved under sail plowing the banks below Rock Hall. She was running with the wind, and her sails were spread wing on wing; she looked like a huge white seabird puffed out proud and steady against the moving blue of the Bay.

Before Clay had left the farmhouse near Trappe to return to school, Curtis Collison had agreed to rent him the small bedroom for $120 a month. Curtis was there when he arrived and watched him and Byron unload his belongings. Afterward,
Clay and Byron hung out in the kitchen. Byron had put some water on the stove.

“You want it black?”

“Yeah.” Clay sat resting at the table.

“Be sure when Curtis gets drunk to leave him alone,” Byron mentioned. “When he drinks, he gets ugly. He likes to fight.”

“How often is that?” Clay asked.

“Not too often,” Byron returned. “Not as often as me.” He didn't smile when he said this.

Byron poured out two cups of instant coffee and brought them to the table. They each sipped at the hot liquid. A clock radio on the counter was on, and the disc jockey was counting down the top ten country tunes.

“So what's your plan?”

Clay stirred his coffee with a finger. “I told you before. I'm going on the river.”

Byron shook his head. “I hoped you might come to your senses.”

“There's a pull to it. I feel it, that's all.”

Byron leaned away, tilting his chair. “You know, I was thinkin' back. There used to be shad in the Bay. Tons of 'em. And sturgeon. Oyster beds like natural reefs, big enough to give names to. Clams. Shit.”

Clay nodded. “I know. The whole world's that way. Changing.”

“Yeah. But making a living on the water . . . Ain't so easy no more.”

“She's still got life, Byron. She's changed. But she's still brimming.”

Clay heard a commotion outside and stood and walked to the kitchen door. Opening it, he looked through the screen to the southern cornfield. It was full of snow geese, and so was the air above it. He stepped out on the porch, and their barking filled his ears as hundreds of them dropped like leaves from the sky, floating
the last few feet to the ground, where others snorted through the stalks, feeding on the kernels left by the husking machines.

Byron had joined him on the porch. “Never seen so many snow geese as the last few years,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Different cycles seem to play their way out, I guess.”

“There's a cause.”

“Sure there is. Those guys on the moon. Upset the balance of gravity.”

“Right.”

“I'm serious. Think about it.”

Clay gave him a playful shove with his shoulder. “How about all those jets landing at Friendship Airport every day. Suppose they knock the earth off kilter?”

Byron frowned. “Moon's different. Smaller. Virgin.”

“Sure.”

“Well, no one really knows, do they?”

“The Bay has her cycles too. And the crabs are strong as ever. If I can just make one or two good seasons, I believe it will work. I could build a business. That's what I plan to do. I figure I'll give it a year or two. Build up my pots. Then reassess.” Clay turned toward Byron. “I'm going to be needing a culler. At first. Then a partner for the second boat, I figure. Eventually.”

“I doubt it.”

“Got any ideas?”

Byron backed up, shaking his head. “You're doing too much dreamin'.”

“What are you living on now, anyway?”

Byron thought for a moment. “I really don't want to know.”

“One day you got to make a move. Put something in front.”

“Maybe.” Byron walked down the steps and opened the door to his pickup. From under the front seat he pulled an opened bottle of Calvert whiskey and returned with it to the stoop.

“Living off the water, you live free,” Clay said.

“To be free, you got to be free in your mind.” Byron took a drink from the bottle and offered it to Clay, who took a drink himself and passed it back.