The Boy in His Winter Read online

“He’ll be fine!” Edgar snapped.

  “You and Edmund better watch out for him,” James admonished.

  “Stop your clucking, Jimbo! We’re Al’s uncles, aren’t we? You remember that, Albert, if anybody asks. You’re with your uncle Edgar and your uncle Edmund. We’ve been driving the boat up north, after Katrina wrecked our house and landing . . . doing a little fishing and sightseeing while we’re at it. You lost your folks in the hurricane.”

  “He’s just a poor orphan!” Edmund said, relishing the thought of my bereavement.

  “Your uncles kindly took you in, and we’re going to New Jersey to visit kin. Now, let’s get dressed.”

  Not even Tom Sawyer had experience with girls. Up until 1835, when I was ravished into timelessness, no one in our gang of ne’er-do-wells had slept with a woman, except an older boy named Ned Tolliver, who’d worked the previous summer on an Ohio River paddleboat as a steward. Well-favored and tall for his years, he caught the eye and fancy of a lady on her way to Cairo to attend a convention of spiritualists and mediums, convened by Andrew Jackson Davis, a seer and clairvoyant from Poughkeepsie. Ned and Miss Clara had what was then called “carnal knowledge” of each other; it happened in the lady’s cabin when Ned came in to change the sheets. He claimed their entwined bodies had levitated a yard above her bed because of his spiritual magnetism. Tom doubted it was as much as a yard, knowing Ned to be inclined toward exaggeration and adornment. I expressed no opinion, being ignorant of spiritualism and sexual congress. I wondered what Tom would think of this escapade and wished he might speak to me in my mind the way he sometimes did. To tell the truth, I was afraid of girls and would rather have swallowed castor oil or a slew of fire ants than sleep with one.

  We walked up Tidewater to Calvert Square—and damn if I didn’t see myself on a signboard perched above a factory’s roof! HOME OF EASY CHAIRS FOR LAZY BOYS it said underneath a picture of Huckleberry Finn in ragged clothes and a straw hat, chewing on a sweetgrass stem, looking indolent and shiftless, with a TV remote in one hand, a glass of lemonade in the other. He was not an exact likeness, but close enough to make me feel again that loosening of self-definition I’d suffered in Panama City in the changing booth. I was distressed and in no mood to undergo the ordeal of first love. I would have slunk away, but the brothers, divining my intention, held my arms.

  In the whorehouse, they pushed me up the stairs behind a fat and yellow-haired woman of middle age named Marigold. She cranked a replica of an old-fashioned gramophone and smiled when Conway Twitty moaned “I’d Love to Lay You Down” from its digital innards. I took off my Bermuda shorts, knowing by hearsay what was expected of a client. The quicker I get this over, I thought, the sooner I’ll be back with James. She laid me across the bed and, cooing, saddled me with her hams. The sight of her gargantuan breasts (so very different from Becky’s or Sophie’s, which I’d pictured in my trance) scared the bejesus out of me. I looked toward my lap and saw my bird was shy. Chuck and chuff as she might, Marigold couldn’t make it cocky.

  “Sorry, honey child,” she said. “Do you want to see my pussy?”

  “No, thanks,” I said, looking instead at a sickly goldfish in a bowl.

  She shrugged, and her massy breasts juddered as if in prelude to a volcanic eruption caused by some titanic strain. She covered up and—maybe to give me my money’s worth—took out a greasy pack of cards. One by one, she dealt out my future until, with a frown, she said, “It’s the death-by-water card, honey.”

  True enough, if you allow for the ambiguity of the word by.

  I went down to the parlor, passing a sailor on the stairs.

  “They said not to wait,” said a blue-haired woman with a cash box.

  I left and walked the way I’d come, thinking, So this is love. . . . The photo of Huck Finn—I will not call it me!—was illuminated by floodlights. He wore the stupid, self-centered face of a hedonist. I hated him and Twain and all else who expropriate another’s life and mind. It doesn’t matter we do not know our own. I wished I’d had a can of whitewash; I’d have climbed up and defaced the sign—blotted out that other boy whose destiny was crossed with mine.

  So now there is another pair of brothers, I said to myself. Which is the bastard: Huck or me?

  I kept on until I reached the boat. James was snoring gently on the sofa bed, where ordinarily I laid me down to sleep. I guessed he meant for me to take his berth. Maybe he knew I’d want to be alone with my sadness or my shame. I went below and, by impulse, looked in Edmund’s stateroom. I don’t know why, unless it was the thrill of fear to be inside an enemy’s lair. I went through the wardrobe and dresser drawers. I didn’t find a gun. I think I thought I might. I don’t know what I would have done with it—thrown it overboard perhaps. I did find a stash of grass. I pinched some for my pipe. In the small aft cabin, I locked the door and, opening the portholes, smoked.

  The night of my fourteenth birthday had been given over to novelty and induction ceremonies—so I told myself while I drew the acrid fume deep into my lungs. I took no more pleasure in it than I had my bout with Marigold. This story is not about innocence—its loss or maintenance—but about a child’s becoming conscious in and of the world.

  AT CHESAPEAKE CITY, on the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, the Psyched twisted a shaft. We lay helpless, riding at anchor while the rain began to fall. James had dived with snorkel and mask to survey the damage, which was beyond his power to repair. Edgar looked at his brother anxiously. Edmund was an instance of the uncertainty principle: To gaze on him must be what an astronomer feels contemplating, through the telescope, the sudden gravitational collapse of a star from nova to degenerate dwarf. Or an immunologist at the birth of a new malignancy. You’ve known people beyond all reason and appeal—impenitent, irredeemable, insufferable. Edmund was one of those. As he swayed by the transom door, I wished Edgar—yielding to the fine rage I saw in him—would push his bastard brother overboard. There are no sharks in the C&D Canal, but the water is sufficient to the drowning of a drunken man. I’d have said swine, but the animal kingdom has never produced a lower specimen than Edmund Connery. If I’d found a gun on my birthday night, I would have used it now and given myself a belated present. Hatred is unattractive, but it’s also irresistible. If men were honest with themselves, they’d admit it’s a stronger passion than lust.

  “Get below, Edmund!” Edgar growled. “And stop your damn drinking!”

  Just then a Coast Guard utility boat came into view, and its captain hailed us.

  “Just what we need!” said Edgar, cursing a tragic destiny that had spliced in an instant the threads of his possible downfall: a twisted shaft and brother, the Coast Guard, and the rain.

  Quick as always on his feet, Edgar laid his brother out with the same wrench James had hoped to use to straighten out the shaft. He bled but little, to our relief. Edgar strapped him in the fighting chair and placed a pint of Tanqueray between his legs. Once again, I admired his flair for camouflage. An officer boarded through our transom door. He seemed annoyed.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “We twisted a shaft,” Edgar replied, and nodded toward James, who smiled beguilingly and confirmed our situation with a helpless glance at the deck.

  “I took a look, and there’s nothing I can do,” James said.

  He emphasized his helplessness by kicking the diving mask across the cockpit sole.

  “You can’t sit out here all night. Where’s your home port?”

  “Just below New Orleans,” Edgar replied suavely. “We beat out the hurricane, but our house was destroyed. We’re running up to New Jersey to stay with family.”

  “That’s tough,” said the captain, softening. “Look, we’ll tow you into Chesapeake City for repairs. What’s wrong with him?”

  While he had been addressing Edgar, he’d had his eye on slumping Edmund.

  “Drunk,” said Edgar; and to forestall the other man’s next question, he went on hurriedly: “He fell and hit his head against th
e gunwale.”

  I could see the captain hesitate between a duty-bound pursuit of truth and his impatience to be gone and out of the rain. The latter won. He did look miserable, the water falling from his hat.

  “There’s a hospital in Wilmington. Will he live till then?”

  “He’s dead drunk is all,” said Edgar, laughing.

  “Get ready for the towline. You better get him below.”

  He returned to the boat and barked orders to his crew. James helped Edgar drag his brother below, then returned and climbed up on the bridge. Edgar followed him on deck and, receiving the tow rope from a crewman, made it fast. The captain boarded us again. Edgar blanched.

  “Let me see your boat papers.”

  Edgar went into the saloon to fetch them. The officer scanned them and handed them back.

  “They’re in order,” he said. And then he added, ironically, “People lose their boats in a hurricane to more than wind and water.”

  He went back aboard, and in short order, we were under tow toward a boatyard in Chesapeake City. That night, we slept on the Psyched while the rain increased and rattled on the hull and the canal water rose and lapped. By morning, the rain had stopped. The boat was trundled out of the water on a length of track that led inside a shed of grizzled boards, and her damaged shaft was pulled. The foreman promised she’d be ready in late afternoon.

  The brothers walked along the canal: Edmund to find a barroom, Edgar to keep him halfway sober. James and I walked west on Boat Yard Road, then turned onto Lock Street, where, farther down, we came on a traveling carnival. You know the kind, with rides and stalls of redemption games and a line of tents with a tired barker announcing freaks. These were ordinary: scaled-up or -down versions of the human frame, stunted or elongated limbs, a man got up as a three-headed dog, and a topless woman lolling on a chaise longue, lazily flipping her mermaid’s tail.

  Once, Tom Sawyer had paid Hannibal’s only certifiable lunatic to lie out on the mudflats, her top half naked, her legs and bottom stuffed into a canvas fish tail with painted scales resembling shingles. That was another one of his schemes to scare the daylights out of Jim. Only Jim became infatuated with her—an unforeseen circumstance that amused Tom endlessly. Poor Jim would moon about the mudflats by day and, carrying a lantern, at night, looking for his mermaid, who was never seen again. Crazy with rapture for this fabricated creature of the deep, he’d have stolen himself away from his lawful owner and forsaken his unlawful wife and children to be with a chimera, which, doubtless, would have broken his sad heart. I’d feared for his wits and stayed near him in case he should decide to drown himself for love. (Why a black slave and not I could have been made desperate by love is a mystery.) Standing in the tent, sweating with shameful remembrance and with the close and stinking tented air, I said to myself, I’m sorry, Jim, for the part I often played in your torment and for the pleasure I took.

  I listened in my mind for an answer but heard nothing but the barking of the phony Cerberus standing guard at the gates of the underworld, scratching an itch on its behind. I was ignorant of all mythologies. I knew little about the life after this one, except what Miss Watson had rammed down my throat, chased with castor oil. But I sensed in the stirring of a canvas flap at the rear of the tent the presence of something uncanny and not of this world. There was a shadow there that swelled and shrank in the canvas folds. I recalled the white tent’s flap at Vicksburg, which opened on a stack of Union dead. I was scared.

  “Let’s go,” I said to James, who seemed to understand my uneasiness.

  He had the gift, like Jim. Was it no more exotic, no more mysterious than sympathy? But what is more mysterious than this resonance, this etheric transmission whose source and purpose is affection?

  Maybe the story I’m telling is just another one about love.

  We returned to the boatyard in time to see the Psyched float off the trolley into the water. The foreman started the engines and backed her into the canal in a cloud of diesel smoke. Satisfied with how she answered the helm, he brought her alongside the dock. James jumped aboard and took the wheel. I followed and, without a word, went below to think. Even a fourteen-year-old boy sometimes has to think. After a while, I heard the brothers come aboard and the boat get under way.

  WE HEADED EAST ON A SLACK TIDE and left the C&D Canal below Delaware City. All was well as we hugged the Jersey side of Delaware Bay, dropping southerly to Egg Island Point, then southeast for the Jersey capes. Rounding them, we pushed into the Atlantic in a low sea and then northward to Little Egg Inlet, above Atlantic City: a seven-hour cruise from the C&D’s eastern entrance. We left the ocean at Little Egg and crossed Great Bay to Bogans Cove—the end of our journey and of my childhood. The sun was nearly fallen over Goose Cove, to the west of us, while we tied up at a ruined pier behind an empty building where once small boats had been built. Its bricks needed pointing, the mortar mostly eaten away by rain and the salt air of the marshes; the roof was gone in places, and not a window had been spared the stones of rampaging boys. The place must have been favored by lovers. The cracked asphalt, annexed by blueweed, was sown with French letters—James called them “little socks of love”—where fugitive pleasure had occurred, rough-and-tumble, in the backseats of cars. A car parked beside the loading bay had its tinted windows up. Its cooling engine ticked as if counting down—a bomb about to detonate. James was uneasy, but the brothers walked toward the car in a common delirium of greed. James and I remained behind in the cockpit.

  Yes, I need to do this right. It’s my one concession to the guile of storytelling. A climactic moment for the four of us and a hinge on which the balance of my life will swing. An accident—unless, as it did the sparrow, providence saw what was about to fall down on us with the weight of inevitability. None of us saw it coming, although James sensed something in the air. It smelled of tidal mud and rot. He searched it with his broad nose as if to scry our fortunes. Edgar and Edmund were standing in a darkness cast by a corrugated iron roof above the loading bay. Two men in suits were leaning against the car; a third, the driver, stood opposite. Edgar turned and whistled for us to join them. I started toward the transom door, but James stayed me with his hand. I recalled seeing it bleed when he nicked it cutting bait. Where was that? Near Roanoke, whose first settlers vanished. I remembered my surprise at seeing the color of James’s blood. Red. What had I expected? I was such an ignorant and benighted child!

  “James! Albert!” Edmund called. I thought it strange: He rarely spoke to me, and only reluctantly or disdainfully would he speak to James. “Some people want to meet you.”

  “You stay here, Mr. Albert!” James said in a low voice that seemed to hiss at me. “I don’t like the look of this. Keep your eyes wide open. If you see trouble, you get the hell away from here. Hide yourself in the marsh. Understand?”

  I nodded, and with an enigmatic smile, he stepped onto the dock and walked toward the car. I was seeing the last of him. James was another who vanished from my life in time. (But there are zones, remember, where clocks have no dominion.) I heard a car door slam, then angry voices, shouts, scuffling. Edgar goddamned his brother, who had worked his knife up below a rib. Edgar slumped against the car, then crumpled among the blueweed, shards of glass, and little socks of love. It all happened too fast to make a story of it.

  James yelled to me. A shot was fired, another. I jumped over the side and slipped, nimble as a water rat, into the current. I let myself go into the dark and drifted noiselessly under stars aloof from the affairs of humankind. I crawled from the water up into the salt grass. In my hand, I clutched a brick of cannabis, wrapped in plastic. How I came to have it is a question I’ve yet to answer. The Connerys had set a brick aside to smoke on the trip home to Louisiana. With the money they made selling grass, Edgar planned to buy a fishing camp in the Delta; Edmund had something else in mind. Had I picked it up in my panic, or had James put it in my hand? So much hope and so much terror centered in a weed! Miss Watson had sworn by a c
annabis extract manufactured by the Brothers Smith as a sovereign remedy for migraine. In the year of our Lord 2005, would she suffer her sick headaches or find someone in downtown Hannibal to sell her bud—a no-good shiftless boy perhaps?

  The sun rose like an orange, having made its senseless round again. I knew in my bones that it did not rise for me. I walked along the shore of Great Bay toward the reddening horizon, for that was where the ocean was. On a grassy landing, I found a canoe whose aluminum form was made to look like bark. Whoever owned it was, no doubt, sleeping while the bleached blue air swirled and seeped into the house, invisible behind a stand of pines, whose scent reminded me of home. By “home,” I mean the place where I was happiest: childhood, my first on the Mississippi, 1,263 miles above the Gulf of Mexico—a world, like the first settlement at Roanoke, now peopled by the dead. The world is new for each of us in turn; that’s something we forget.

  I took the canoe—a paddle had been left for me (by providence or by Jim, who may, in fact, be it)—and crossed a chain of little bays, over dead Indians’ bones picked clean in whispers, south to Brigantine, where I got a job, of sorts, taking tickets in a fun house, whose theme was pirates—their ship and treasure. And so does each point in our lives refer to something previous. I think this is what’s meant by déjà vu.

  I sat inside a booth, unwinding pale blue tickets from a shrinking roll, and remembered how Tom Sawyer and I had heaved cardboard cutlasses at each other and how our childish hopes of finding treasure buried in the mud had been habitually dashed. (Once, we found the skeleton of a dog; the name on its collar was Duke.) Was it innocence or folly or an expression of the need to halt that made me show the roller coaster operator the brick of marijuana? Even now, so very many years later, I don’t know what was in my mind, if anything at all. The next day, I was cuffed, shoved into the backseat of a squad car, arraigned, and, shortly thereafter, sent to the New Jersey juvenile detention center in Elizabeth. I would stay inside its walls until I turned seventeen and was sent back into the world to begin my life anew.