The Boy in His Winter Read online

  James paid the barber; I heard the register ring, the cash drawer shut with force enough to make bottles of hair tonic on the counter chime. I heard a barking dog outside and fell suddenly all the way back to Hannibal, to the shack where I’d lived with Pap. A barking dog—so slight and melancholy a thing—is a thread on which my memories, planets of my revolving days, are strung. To hear that bark recalls me sadly to the lengthening river of my years. It is a time machine that depends only on the human wish to visit what is gone.

  James and I stepped out into the glaring afternoon and turned north onto Balboa Avenue. He didn’t saunter the way he usually would to prove a nonchalance and superiority, but dragged along as if slowed by an invisible anchor. I guessed he was scared at the prospect of meeting Sophie.

  “It’s been nearly three years since I saw my girl,” he said. “I wonder if she’ll even remember me.”

  I said nothing, unqualified to speak to the loneliness and guilt of absent fathers. I was a boy, after all, regardless of my years and my bitterness toward my own pap.

  “You know, Mr. Albert,” he said, abruptly casting off his pensiveness, “you’re still unfit to be seen in public. What you need next are some new threads.”

  I made no objection when he took my arm and steered us into a department store, its big plate-glass windows boarded over in the wake of Katrina. The threads I wore were those I’d found inside the crate, which had delivered me safely—remember—to the Venice necropolis.

  No, I like the word! It gives distinction to a common graveyard. It makes me hopeful of a flourishing civilization after death, even if a somber one. I picture silent throngs minding their own business in a city of the dead, with streets and marble buildings, graveled paths and benches where shades sit and feed pigeons with crumbs. Real pigeons, real crumbs! I like it better than a picture of tombstones, like headboards for beds of clay and grass, in rows, reminding me of the children’s ward where I recovered from a fever during my reform school years. We’ll get to them in due course.

  James chose a shirt—a gaudy thing bright with parrots—and a pair of loud Bermuda shorts. I tried on leather sandals and a yellow baseball hat. In the changing booth, I saw myself with a shock of unrecognition, which staggered me. I’d seen my face before then: in mirrors on the boat and in the barbershop and long, long ago in shining puddles after rain. I remember coming upon my face, suddenly and for the first time, in a looking glass on Miss Watson’s dressing table. But I must not have really seen, not with fresh eyes and a newly minted gaze. It may have been the clothes and the haircut. But I felt a dispossession and dared not leave the changing booth, for fear I’d leave my face and self in the mirror. Children become philosophers when standing in front of mirrors. They invent worlds and stories there.

  “Albert! Are you done admiring yourself?” James called from the dressing room door.

  I broke the thread of my stare, turned from the mirror, and went outside in my new clothes.

  “You took your time,” he said.

  What a funny expression! As though time were mine or anyone else’s to take.

  James paid the cashier. I dumped my old clothes and shoes into a plastic bag. On the street, James looked his old self once more. Jaunty and swaggering, he walked briskly toward his Sophie.

  Edgewater Gardens had neither water nor gardens, although there was a dusty palm tree whose roots had lifted and cracked the sidewalk during the hurricane; and there were bushes full of birds I heard but never saw. We went inside the brick building, climbed to the second floor; James knocked on a door, and in a moment Sophie opened it.

  “Are you my dad?” she asked ingenuously.

  “I am,” he said, unsure of what to do with his feet except to shuffle them in the dust.

  The girl’s mother appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel, which smelled of shrimp.

  “Come on in!”

  If James had worried about his welcome, he needn’t have. She—her name was Camille—smiled warmly at him. Her skin made me think of copper and syrup. A bruise-colored butterfly hovered where her ample breast began to swell above the halter top. When she smiled at me, I saw she had a “valentine tooth” like James’s. Perhaps in Trinidad, troths were pledged with gold-clad teeth instead of rings. I looked at her hand; she wore a cultured pearl on her finger, but not a wedding band. I don’t know whether she and James were married. I never asked.

  We went into the kitchen and sat, without a prelude of drinks, peanuts, and small talk in the living room. Without asking, she ladled peppery jambalaya into our bowls. We ate and talked all at once. Afterward, she carried the dirty bowls into the kitchen, singing a Calypso song, while James poked foolishly at the girl, who laughed. Camille brought us more beer. The ice-cold bottles sweat and beaded; the bent bottle caps made a pleasant heap. Sophie got up on her toes and danced. I said little. What did I know of this life?

  “I’ve got a present for you,” James said, giving the girl the package he’d lugged all the way from the boat.

  She tore the pink tissue paper from a walnut music box.

  “Take it into the front room to play with,” he said. “Mr. Albert, you go with her.”

  I followed Sophie into the living room while James led Camille into her bedroom.

  The box unfolded into a stage for a tiny ballerina painted gold. Sophie wound a key, and the little figure danced one half of a Tchaikovsky pas de deux, her body reflected in a suite of mirrors. Sophie and I lay on the floor, her chin resting against her palm, my cheek against my arm. I couldn’t take my eyes from the golden figurine turning in the row of mirrors, lit by an accidental slant of light that had traveled across a gulf of space as if with no other thought than to make my eyes grow heavy, my eyelids droop and close until I’d fallen into a trance.

  Tom Sawyer had told me how, in a St. Louis music hall where an uncle had taken him and Sid for a birthday treat, a mentalist in a stovepipe and black frock coat tried to hypnotize him with a gold watch twisting on its chain in a sickly light cast by gas brackets. Tom was a difficult subject, he told me proudly on his return to Hannibal, able to resist the power of suggestion. Unlike my old friend, I have always been susceptible to another’s will.

  Sophie was telling me how pretty the apartment was—all lit up with candles during the storm—when I fell asleep on the floor. Was it sleep? It reminds me of what used to happen to our minds when, as boys, we’d breathe deeply into a paper bag: Our eyes would go dark and sting, and we’d swoon.

  “Do you want to see my titties?”

  Becky Thatcher was undoing the buttons of her blouse.

  “You’re Tom’s girl! Get away from me!”

  “Albert! Albert, you’re dreaming!”

  Somebody was shaking me. Tom. Tom, it wasn’t my fault—it was Becky’s doing.

  “Wake up, Albert!”

  I opened my eyes, to see Sophie kneeling next to me. Her blouse was buttoned. I’ve never been sure if it was she who’d wanted to show me her breasts, or Becky. Embarrassed by the knot of lust in my pants (Tom used to call it a “woody”), I ran outside. Night with its mockery of stars had begun to sift down over the town. I made up my pipe and smoked, wondering what it was, exactly, that James was doing to Camille and she to him. And all the men and women lying together under the roofs of Panama City (the wrecked roofs covered with tarps to keep out night and rain)—what was it that made them search one another out with their mouths and hands? Was it love or desire, human need or only fear?

  “You all right, Mr. Albert?” James asked, sitting on the curb next to me.

  The street was pitch-dark; the streetlights had not been restored since the storm, which had blown into me its turmoil and noise.

  I nodded yes, mutely, in case my voice should shake.

  “You know, Mr. Albert, this trip we’re making—it’s not good for you. They’re using you, those Connery boys. You’re part of a plan, Albert, to make us all look innocent. Do you know why we’re going to Atlantic City
and why we stopped here? We’re delivering mail: marijuana, grass, doobie, weed, bud, cannabis, Mary Jane, kryptonite—call it what you like. The brothers thought a boy on board would make excellent camouflage. Edgar’s smart. He figured the best time to run the stuff from Mexico to AC was right after a big hurricane. Coast Guard, cops would be busy looking after people who lost their homes. They’d have New Orleans and the levees to worry about. We crossed over from Tampico and slipped into a bayou near Port Eads just before the storm broke. We hitched the boat nice and snug to some big trees; the boys knew how to do it so she’d ride up on the surge without breaking up. Then we hunkered down inside an old cinder-block garage and waited it out. Afterward, it was like Edgar said: chaos and confusion. He’d everything figured, except his brother. I’m scared something bad’s going to happen, Mr. Albert, and I don’t want you getting hurt.”

  I listened quietly, taking comfort in the smell of cherry smoke and the pipe’s taste of toasted corn cake. The stars hung over us like a spider’s silver web. I could hear, behind me, Zydeco music playing from the window of Camille and Sophie’s apartment. The moment was too rare for me to contemplate the brothers’ treachery.

  “I’d like you to stay here, Albert.”

  “Here?” I said, pausing in the contemplation of a cloud of tobacco smoke, which, instant by instant, was reconciling its contrarieties.

  James nodded and went on. “I’ve asked Camille to take you in, and she’s agreed. She’s a good woman; she’ll treat you like her own. You can grow up with Sophie—live like an ordinary boy.”

  Like an ordinary boy . . .

  “Would you like that, Mr. Albert?”

  I looked at James as Mary must have at the angel Gabriel. Can you imagine what his words meant, the altered life he’d organized and invoked? My resentment flared, but I dampened it at once. I realized this was not the moment for Roman candles of self-important rage. This man James had shown me what the world considers love. I cursed Pap for his folly in making me without it. Spellbound by his idea, James did not notice my mood’s alternations of light and dark. I drew on my pipe, blew another cloud, took it out of my mouth, and smiled my earnest thanks at him. But I was not ready to be civilized.

  “I’m sorry, James,” I said.

  He was a man of little education, but his apprehension was enormous. Like that other, older James, he had sensitivity, which Hannibal had considered an exclusive property of the well-bred and the well-to-do. Out of respect for my feelings, James never mentioned his glorious plan for me again.

  WE ENTERED THE INLAND PASSAGE at St. Lucie Inlet on Florida’s eastern coast. Norfolk lay 987 miles to the north. Most of the way was no wider than the Mississippi at Hannibal. I never liked the feeling of spaciousness one gets on the plains or on the open sea. Maybe because I lived my early years—those called “impressionable”—among trees that cloaked our lumber town and much of the river southward to the Gulf. Distant horizons and vistas without end dizzy me. Contemplating them, I feel unmoored. We cruised between marshy banks of salt grass and crowding cypress trees, under pale green canopies of oaks—slowing, while we passed weather-beaten hamlets and when the waterway turned from river to canal or widened into lakes incised by sailboat keels and water skis. We fished in the lazy fashion of backwaters, trading outriggers and the fighting chair for light tackle or hand lines. I put away the cruel gaff and marlin hooks.

  Of all the days I spent aboard the Psyched, these on the Intracoastal Waterway were best. When the brothers quarreled, I left them the cockpit and climbed onto the bridge to sit with James. We were often quiet, which was fine with me. With James, I never felt obliged to speak. I talked, or not, according to my mood or the provocations along the way: a wading bird, thin and ungainly, shrugging off the weight of gravity to find its elegant form in flight; a huge carp broaching the water with a flash of gold scales; a deer, its summer coat glossy and chestnut, kneeling on delicate legs to drink; the burned-out ruin of a house or boat, showing gray ribs to the indifferent sun; and once, near Brunswick, on the Georgia coast, a drowned man draped with weeds as if in mourning for himself.

  Edmund reached with a boat hook through the transom door and hooked the man while James idled the engines. The body lapped heavily against the stern with a dismal sound. Edmund turned it over; it wallowed in the trough behind us and then seemed to insist on its dignity by a show of calm disregard for our wake, Edmund’s hook, and the unkind light, by which we saw how the water had bloated him, how time had turned him blue, and how crabs had gotten to his face and hands. I was sick in my yellow hat.

  “Edmund, let him be,” said Edgar.

  Edmund obliged his brother by pushing the dead man away from the boat. The body was galvanized in a current, as if it had borrowed its will, and moved off.

  “Shouldn’t we take him ashore?” I asked James, who was tapping a fingernail against his golden tooth impassively.

  “Can’t do that, Albert. Can’t get involved—not with what we’re carrying. You know that.”

  I thought I detected spite for my having rebuffed Camille’s generosity. But I knew he was right about the dead man, though I wished we could help him find his way to consecrated ground. (All ground is consecrated by rain and snow, by sun and the migrations of earthworms through the chocolate earth.) One man adrift in space and time is enough: Jim unburied is enough. James and I did not look each other in the eye. He pushed on the throttles, and the boat pulled away from that fatal intersection. I wanted to say some holy words but didn’t know any, except for Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, which was what Tom Sawyer had said over the rigid bodies of frogs and cats. I spilled a little ash from my pipe onto the water. I had seen how death serves its summons on our kind. I was caught on the rack of time as I am now on the rack of my story, which is told in time and about it.

  You say I should make it livelier, that it needs more action and less meditation. Fine, we’ll rid the second draft of all annoying thought and embarrassing emotion. I’ll tell a story—simple and plain—like “Big Two-Hearted River.”

  We went on and delivered mail at Savannah, Charleston, and Cape Fear. I angled for redfish, sea trout, bluefish, black drum, and Spanish mackerel. I lolled against the gunwale, half-asleep, half-afraid I would put myself under, entranced by shifting coins of light. Tired of fishing, I kept James company at the helm. Kitty Hawk was on our starboard side. Another pair of brothers, Wilbur and Orville, had flown an airplane on the beach below Kill Devil Hills in 1903 while Jim and I were on the raft. Their minds spun shining equations concerning lift, which unseated gravity; our minds—Jim’s and mine—were luminous with history, which we had overleaped. The Connerys’ minds were mired in base appetites. I looked at James and almost wished I’d stayed in Panama City. But there was no going back. We may not realize it, but every point during the passage of our lives is a point of no return—except for what memory permits.

  “Do you think of Sophie and Camille?” I asked James, curiosity overcoming discretion.

  “I try not to,” he said without antagonism. “It’s better to look ahead and imagine what’s beyond the reaches than to cry over the past. Best not to get bogged down in it, Mr. Albert.”

  I have always fought the treachery of the past, which rises up and makes the present unlivable.

  OUR LAST DELIVERY ON THE INLAND PASSAGE was Norfolk, Virginia. We tied up at an abandoned wharf north of the Campostella Road bridge. Edgar and Edmund put on mail carriers’ uniforms and packed mailbags with cannabis. In Charleston, dressed as deliverymen, they had pushed orange-colored hand trucks stacked with bricks in shipping cartons. They were, at one and the same time, visible and not: the brothers, the boxes, the mailbags. This, too, was Edgar’s idea, and you must admit its brilliance, regardless of your low opinion of him. I stayed behind with James, helping wash the cockpit, swab the decks, and polish the brightwork with chamois cloths. As I recall, we said little that afternoon, and I see no point in inventing conversation. Not now, when I’m hell bent
on the truth.

  The brothers returned in high spirits, their mailbags empty. Edgar set the day’s Virginian-Pilot newspaper on the galley table. I saw the date and said, without thinking there could be consequences, “Today’s my birthday.”

  James shook my hand and was pleased. “How old, Master Albert?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Happy birthday!” said Edgar, clapping me on the back. “May you live long enough to know better, as my old man used to say.”

  “Let’s get the little shit laid!” said Edmund, who had, I saw, been drinking.

  Edgar offered to finance my rite of passage. (Or is it right?)

  I was reluctant; James, worried. “Fourteen’s a little young,” he said.

  “Crap!” said Edmund.

  “Fourteen’s the perfect age,” said Edgar. “He can see what his hand’s been missing, and he’s young enough not to have to shoot himself with regret. Isn’t that right, Al?”

  I nodded, afraid to do otherwise. How many boys have been sent to a woman’s bed for the first time, unwilling and unfledged—carried there by a jeer or a maxim? James paced the saloon, not knowing whether to abduct me, break the brothers’ heads, or give me one of his French letters. Edgar drizzled me with cologne, like a priest sprinkling holy water. Edmund guffawed and tipped back a bottle in a brown paper bag. The occasion was festive and might have been mistaken for a party, had I not been frowning.

  “The kid still stinks,” said Edmund.

  Edgar must have agreed, because he pushed me into the master stateroom head to shower.

  “I still say Albert’s too young to be with a woman,” James said while Edmund practically barked me with water jetting from the shower wand.