The Boy in His Winter Read online

  You say I begin to preach too much? That my story is better told without anger.

  Anger, friend, is the fuse. (So, too, is love.) And there is nothing like a pipe smoked in the small hours of the night to light it.

  Far out on the water, a bell tolled. Its theme was a fitful, broken one: what a buoy performs in concert with an unruly sea. Straining, my eyes picked out a distant light, which came and went with the tilting surface of the Gulf. The wind had risen; I hadn’t been aware of it till now. I shivered, and then I saw Jim.

  Jim, my Jim! Surely, I’ve admitted to stranger things! All right, I thought I saw him—thirty or forty yards from shore—floating on his back, caught in a riptide. He was not lollygagging; he was traveling with a full head of steam, as if hurrying toward a rendezvous or a wedding. I remembered him as I had seen him last, at Waggaman, with no more life than a sack of pig entrails tossed onto a steaming ash heap. Only it was the river that steamed with humidity after rain. Jim became what his assassins always said he was: a thing. You must forgive an old man his tears. At my age, we cry easily. He would cry, you know—Jim would, turning his back on me, out of delicacy or shame. He had no more idea of manners than a post, but he was delicate in his feelings. You’d have thought he would have had every inch and particle of them beaten out of him.

  Once, Judge Thatcher had to register a will in Jefferson City and took Tom along to see a dead pharaoh recently stolen from its tomb in Memphis (the ancient one). Egypt had been a craze ever since Napoléon’s Armée d’Orient and the Battle of the Pyramids. The museum also had an exhibition devoted to Henry Darcy’s hydrological experiments with water flowing through beds of sand. With his clever mind, Tom conflated water and mummies in what he called “The Hydrology of the Dead.” Tom did have a highfalutin way with words! The gist of his theory was that the dead do not always stay put: They circulate according to principles of hydrology. The pharaoh in the museum had arrived at a point where past and present converged, as if washed up in Missouri by time’s ocean, in an expression of the conservation of momentum. To put it plainly, the dead are often wayward; and the drowned whose bodies are never recovered can be cussed and ungovernable. If Tom was correct, Jim, whose body was dumped into the Mississippi and never given proper burial, would circulate in the world’s liquid element forever. It gave me chills to think of it.

  I knocked my pipe against a rail and watched the ember fall and vanish on the water. Even the hardened heart must sometimes feel a prodding of the invisible and be moved, however briefly, by fear or awe. Whether because of Jim’s revenant or a sudden oppressiveness of the magnolia-scented air, I understood that I had, in the quenching of that ember, witnessed a catastrophe: my death in its, the world’s death in my own. My atoms may have started to decay, their orbits worn by age; but I was still only thirteen and could shake off anxiety as easily as I could a pesky fly. I went below and quickly fell asleep.

  I DON’T LIKE FISHING. Oh, as a boy in Hannibal, I liked nothing better than to drop a length of twine into the river and lift out sunnies, perch, pickerel, and ugly old catfish, which looked at me out of goggled eyes, expressing an ancient weariness and disgust with the shenanigans of boys and the single-mindedness of men. I had no experience then of fish prized by anglers on big boats: sailfish, tuna, and blue marlin, which can weigh more than a half ton and had kept company with great whales when the waters of the earth were newly formed. (What of Melville’s whale, which was hunted and harried into literature to become an imitation, a whale of words, or worse—a symbol?)

  Edmund hooked a marlin the morning we went out to fish the Mississippi Canyon, forty miles off the coast. He spent seventy-five minutes strapped to the fighting chair, pitting his abject self against the fish’s majesty, while James maneuvered from the bridge. Edgar praised and heckled his brother by turns, and I leaned against the gunwale, wanting to be sick. I dreaded the moment when I would have to yank the poor creature up by its gills. Not that I had strength to contribute much to a titanic struggle between the dominant species on land and that of the deep. Shoving me aside, Edgar would have to drag up the inert, broken beast. Fury and indignation spent, it gasped in the morning air, with a profound look of melancholy in its eyes I cannot forget. I don’t know how long it took to pass into what constitutes the timeless dimension for fish. But when it did, I felt what the three Marys must have when Jesus finally died: a mixture of sorrow and relief.

  Except for a horse blown apart at Vicksburg, I’d never seen death on this scale; and it shook me more than corpses of my own kind had done. To see this dead thing sprawled in the cockpit affected me as an elephant would, lying in the street, hacked to death with a meat hook. I’d angled up small fish with tiny hooks, which could bite a finger painfully; but the one impaling the great fish’s mouth had the heft of a longshoreman’s. Death has its measurement, and in our minds, we correlate torment with the corpse’s size.

  Edmund shambled into the galley to make his own sullen and solitary version of an occasion, with booze and potato chips dipped in a bowl of Chinese mustard. Edgar hosed the blood down the cockpit drain. I went up onto the bridge and sat next to James, who turned the boat toward Panama City, on the Florida Panhandle.

  “You’re white as a sheet, Mr. Albert,” he said without derision.

  I said nothing, unsure of his opinion of childish tears and flapdoodle. I had been as cruel as any other shiftless knockabout. I’d burned ants alive with a magnifying glass I stole from Judge Thatcher’s desk; I’d scorched a couple of cats and visited death and destruction on a community of gophers. I’d slaughtered no end of innocent birds and varmints with my slingshot and never shed a tear. But here I was, sniveling and wiping onto the back of my hand the snot my nose seemed to manufacture, as if in mourning for all creation.

  “When we get to Panama City, I know a little gal who’ll cheer you up,” said James.

  “Who’s she?”

  “My own sweet little daughter.”

  James had daughters and sons scattered all along the Gulf Coast, spawned during youthful adventures as a smuggler of Trinidad rum and Brazilian absinthe, a deckhand and, later, a second mate aboard an oil tanker. He marked his children’s positions on a map kept with his gear. Some he called dangerous reefs; others, happy isles. He was on friendly terms with three of his “wives” and liked to visit them when he could for a home-cooked meal and a familiar, warm, and fragrant bed.

  “Her name’s Sophie. She’s about your age and wants to be a ballerina. I got a present for her.”

  We cruised more or less easterly toward the west coast of Florida, keeping well offshore—again, so as not to attract attention. Edmund butchered the marlin and stuffed the refrigerated fish boxes under the cockpit deck with meat. He kept a couple hunks to rot in the sun, which they soon did, and stunk. Is that the past tense of stink? I used to have a grammar book and a manual of style, but they’re both long gone. I don’t intend to say anything else about fishing, although we did fish a little each day for the sake of appearances. One dead fish is very much like another. If people want to read about the fishing we did aboard the Psyched, they can buy The Old Man and the Sea. This is not that kind of book. To be honest, I’m not sure what kind of book this is.

  You want to know why Edmund left the meat to rot?

  For the same reason Edgar bought me a dog when we got to Panama City. And for the same reason the brothers wanted me along on the trip to Atlantic City.

  You think I’m giving too much away? That I should wait for a more dramatic moment in my tale than this, the tearful aftermath of a fish’s destruction—all tension spent? Story line and fishing line, both gone slack.

  Maybe you’re right, and I should wait at least until we get to Panama City and the dog. Storytelling is all about well-timed revelations. But I’m annoyed by writers who manipulate me, parceling out information as though they were dealing dope. To hell with narrative strategy! The moment seems right to me—now that I’ve shown how inadequate a gaff boy
and deckhand I was—to reveal the reason for my being on board. The brothers used me as window dressing, in case the Coast Guard boarded us. With me leaning on a gaff, like a shepherd in a Christmas play, we were likely to be taken for a party of sportsmen instead of marijuana smugglers. For days, the brothers had been conditioning me to call them “Uncle.” (James was always James.)

  The stinking meat and the dog? Edgar’s idea. He reasoned they’d throw a drug-sniffing hound off the scent. He had a subtle intelligence for a former garage mechanic, waterman, and roustabout. Edmund’s career was checkered with sojourns in reformatory and the county jail. What he did when he was at large involved—in their seasons—crab traps, a pick and shovel, supplying raw material to the proprietors of whiskey stills in the Louisiana backwoods. I don’t know what this book is about, but it feels like it might have something to do with the embarrassing notion of goodness. And its apparent scarcity.

  Do I believe in it?

  I’m still undecided. A boy, I did not judge people as I do now, according to a complicated Hammurabi’s code constructed of absolutes mitigated by fear, doubt, self-interest, and that “golden rule,” the quid pro quo. A boy, I judged as the sponge or oyster does the water it imbibes: by recoil and painful shock or a vague sense of well-being. Children are unconscious of good and evil and remain that way until they reach the age of self-regard. The adolescent discovers a tiny universe of the self with his first pimple and plunges headlong into a lifetime of dubious ethical transaction with the wider world.

  I thought of Edmund as a Morlock fattening on the Eloi, one of whom could have been his brother, Edgar. Edmund was gross in body and soul, gruff and stolid, while Edgar was fast on his feet, quick-witted, and eloquent in a rough-spoken way. I would not have called Edgar handsome, but he had a liveliness and a lightness of touch that made him attractive, despite the error of his ways. He was surely not the best of men, but he was hardly the worst. Edmund was a reprobate: a man to be wary of. When the brothers fought—they seemed to be constantly at each other’s throats—I hid. James found their brawls amusing and would watch them scuffle like two bantam roosters in the cockpit. They fought over priority (Edgar was older by a year), percentages (Edgar wanted a larger one for having planned the job), and my value to the “consortium” (Edgar insisted I be paid a thousand dollars; Edmund wanted to give me nothing).

  “He’s useful,” Edgar said with a coolness that belied the mounting temperature of his blood. He was slow to anger but would boil over without warning.

  “He’s a useless sack of excrement,” Edmund grumbled, playing with his knife.

  I was unnerved to find myself the fulcrum of their hate and went outside to James, who was putting a skirt on a naked ballyhoo. I watched his nimble hands thread the hook through the small creature’s eyes and wished I were elsewhere—back in Hannibal with Tom Sawyer, playing tricks on Jim or the spiteful spinsters. Tom had been the brains of our operation, and it had been fine not to think much or weigh the consequences of our pranks. James’s hands were scaly like the fish—from psoriasis. At that instant, he seemed part fish himself, whose element, like mine, is water. And by Tom’s harebrained hydrological theory, Jim would swim throughout my life—and did, in James and in one other we have yet to meet.

  “I’m sorry you got tangled up in this,” James said, trimming the leader line.

  I did feel an awful lot like a fish rising in a water column toward a baited ballyhoo and net. But there are motions that have an omnipotence impossible to resist—call them fate or accident or chance—fight them as you will. I was caught up! And maybe the bait to which I’d eagerly given my mouth had danced before my eyes way back when, in Hannibal, in water shining on the mudflats, or even before, in a spurt of Finn blood that came from my pap or his—conceived at the dawn of time, with the latching of a distant pair of chromosomes. Concocted in a primal ooze or, more remotely still, with the cooling of a star—its death and aftermath in me.

  “Edmund scares me,” I said.

  “Of the two, Edmund’s the less dangerous,” James said.

  That surprised me!

  “He’s a mean bastard you know you can’t trust and have to watch. But Edgar’s greedy and ruthless, too, only they don’t show on him like they do on his brother.”

  “Edgar wants to give me a thousand dollars,” I said, offering it as proof of his goodness.

  “You don’t have it in your pocket yet—do you, Mr. Albert? Besides, that’s a drop in the ocean of what he hopes to make out of this job.”

  I wanted to ask James why he had signed on for it, but I didn’t. I must have suspected even then that a smile and a pleasant word could be a pretty whitewashed fence around a house of horrors. I didn’t want to know what James was like on the inside. I needed someone on that boat to admire. And—it’s true!—I had begun to think that maybe Jim had gotten into James—was passing through on his way to who knows where—to look after me. I told you I was a romantic!

  It may not have been Panama City where Edgar bought the dog. Last night, I was waiting to fall asleep and thinking over my story, when I remembered we had stopped for fuel between Gulfport and Panama City. It must have been Biloxi, and Edgar didn’t buy the dog; he found it on the dock, licking grease from a hamburger wrapper. He was mangy, old, and starved—perfect for Edgar’s purpose: to confuse the nose of dogs conscripted for the drug wars. Our dog, which I named Duke, fell overboard forty miles off Sanibel, near the Florida coast, and was eaten by sharks lured, no doubt, by its smell. And so are man’s devious ways confounded by nature or by chance. I had emptied my reservoir of tears for the marlin; it had not yet been replenished by optimism or hope. Duke went into the bloody maw, unwept by me, although not unmourned.

  Funny, how completely I’d forgotten Biloxi, its tumbled houses and broken trees. It had vanished from the map and record of my life. Memory must be a kind of radiation—its source an unidentified substance in the human brain. It weakens according to a rate of decay established by something chill and beyond all human warmth.

  WE PUT INTO PANAMA CITY at the hour when the water turns pale, opalescent—a bath of cobalt grains in suspension; the air and sky seem one and the same. To breathe is to swallow the sea. At such an hour, we can believe in goodness, transcendence, and in the radiant idea of God. When, on the raft, I’d asked Jim if he believed in God, he said he feared Him. I thought he meant the terror I felt toward my father. But no, that wasn’t it. He feared He did not exist. At the time, I wondered how so deep a thought could have come from the brain of a slave. But who has more reason to be appalled by God’s absence than a slave?

  Am I afraid?

  I’m afraid to think about it—now that I am eighty-five and failing.

  James and I walked from the St. Andrew Bay marina into Panama City. We left the brothers to wrangle over money and Edmund’s refusal to moderate his drinking. Edgar worried that an instant of drunken uproar would bring the police. His elaborate theater of normality could be undone by a bottle hurled through the windscreen of a nearby boat or a volley of obscenity aimed at a woman on the dock. A pretty girl dressed in three lilac triangles had already caught his brother’s eye while she walked her Pekinese past the cockpit. Edmund’s sullen boozing seemed to increase with every mile. Two days earlier, he’d set fire to a saloon chair after falling asleep lipping a cigarette. Fortunately, we’d been out of sight of land, although the black smoke could have brought a Coast Guard cutter down on us. James was nervous—this man who was the embodiment of calm. Whether the cause was the impending reunion or Edmund’s mutiny, I couldn’t decide. Sophie and her mother lived in a low-income apartment house called Edgewater Garden, and we were expected there for dinner. But first, James insisted I get my hair cut.

  “You look like hell, Mr. Albert,” he said, ruffling my hair affectionately.

  I never liked to be touched—especially in those days when the only person who had ever laid a hand on me was Pap, with force enough to smart. Anybody else but James
would have felt my own hand’s angry reflex. But I’d sensed in his touch only kindness and so let it pass. My hair really must have looked a mess: uncut, unkempt, unbrushed, and clean only because of the showers I took twice a day aboard the Psyched. I was learning to adore showers, sheets, and contrivances like a machine that washed the dirty clothes. The twenty-first century is a vast improvement over the nineteenth, I thought; and when James admitted he’d never heard of castor oil, I was converted to modernity.

  He led me into a “colored” barbershop. There was no more Jim Crow—not even in Mississippi—but the color bar had yet to fall where men went for a haircut and a shave. Segregated by reason of the intimacy of human hair and whiskers (abhorrent to some), a barbershop was a kind of private club where you could get whiskey, news, or even place a bet. I’d never been inside one and was intoxicated by the smell of shaving soap, wintergreen, sweet clipper oil, and eau de cologne, which a barber—a smart-looking gent with a thin mustache—rubbed into the crinkled hair of a man beside me. I sank luxuriously inside my blue-striped bib while my barber—bald and asthmatic—sought out James’s eyes in the mirror for his tonsorial instructions. And then while he pumped a pedal near the floor, I levitated!

  “Cut it all the hell off,” said James, “and send the cooties to the museum of natural science.”

  The barber laughed and turned the clippers on. They growled once, then buzzed into life. He ran them deftly through my hair. I watched it fall, in heavy lanks of dirty blond. When he’d finished cutting and powdering my neck with talc, he swept “my glory” down a hole.

  “Where’s it go?” I asked, indicating with my itching nose the hole, like a trapdoor in the magic show I had seen with Tom Sawyer when we sneaked aboard the White Cloud the year before she sank at St. Louis.

  “I sell it to the ‘wig man,’” he said, and with a flourish, he twitched off my bib, whisked the cut hair from face and neck, stepped on the pedal, which brought me down to earth, and spun the chair toward the mirror—all in one fluent motion. In that motion, I saw—as I do always when watching practiced hands ply their trade—grace. Don’t you find it so?