Second Skin (22 page)

“What’s that about Crooked Finger Rock?” I said, but Red was telling her about the draft and sailing qualities of the
Peter Poor
, telling her that the
Peter Poor
, fish-smothered little filthy scow, was really a racing craft, a little Bermudian racer which he had only converted to a fishing boat a few years ago for his own amusement. And then he gave an analysis of Bermudian racers and then a discussion of nautical miles and speed at sea and the medal the Coast Guard had given him for heroism on the high seas. Steady deep wind-whipped voice. Rapt attention. Bub doubled over in stitches at the little wheel.

But I, at least, made an effort to see the landmarks he thought worthy of our attention, and twisted to leeward and saw a chip of black rock rising and falling in those black crests and hair-raising plumes of spray, and I twisted to windward and a couple of miles away made out the tiny white spire of the lighthouse.

Waves, bright sun, the bow falling, and suddenly I knew what was on my mind, had been on my mind from the first moment I had seen the
Peter Poor.
“Red,” I interrupted him, cupping my hands, insisting, until the big red face swung in my direction and Cassandra stared down at her feet, “Red, there’s no dinghy. Is there, Red?”

“Nope.”

“But, Red, we’ve got to have a dinghy. Don’t you care about our safety?”

Face sniffing the salt, eyes clear, big legs spread wide in the cockpit: “Dinghy couldn’t last in this water. Too rough. . Might’s well go down the first time when the boat goes down.”

“Good God,” I said, “what a way to talk in front of Cassandra.”

“Candy don’t mind. No, sir. She’s a sailor. Told me herself.”

Tiny face composed under the sou’wester. Water on the eyelashes, flush in the cheeks, eyes down. Modest. No objections. Not a glance for father. Not a smile. So I nodded, felt myself thrown off balance again as Bub laughed and swung the little iron wheel that was clotted now with lengths of bright dark green seaweed. How was it, I wondered, that the others were in league with the helmsman, what signals were they passing back and forth while only I heaved about moment by moment in the hard rotten embrace of that little tub?

“Cassandra gets her sea legs from her mother,” I said, but the sea was against me, the Old Man of the Sea was against me, and the waves smelled like salted fish and the engine smelled of raw gasoline and Jomo was still crouching high on the stem and watching me. And all at once I was unable to take my eyes off him: Jomo going up, Jomo going down, up and down, Jomo swaying off to starboard, Jomo swinging back to port, and holding his hook on high where I could see it and aiming the bill of the baseball cap in my direction and fingering his sideburns now and then but keeping his little black eyes on mine and sitting still but sailing all over the place. Without moving his head he spit between his teeth and the long curve of the spittle, as it reached out on the wind, was superimposed against Jomo’s unpredictable motion and dark anxious face. And then I heard him.

“You don’t look too good,” he said. “Don’t feel good, do you? Why don’t you go below? Always go below if you don’t feel good. Here, let me help you down….”

Even as the
Peter Poor
pitched out from under me, Jomo spit one more time and then hopped off the stem, carefully, without effort, and approached me, came my way with his quick black eyes and on his forehead a sympathetic frown. Jomo with his hot advice, his hot concern for my comfort.

“You want to try sleeping,” he said. “Try can you get to sleep and see if I’m not right.”

It sounded good. I was bruised, hot, wet, sleepy, and my mouth was full of salt. Salt and a little floating bile. My face and fingers were wrinkled, puckered, as if I had spent the
morning in a tepid bath. And the red sun had turned to gold and was hot in my eyes.

“Jomo,” I murmured, “there’s no dinghy, what do you think of that.? But the life jackets, Jomo, point them out to me, will you?”

And roughly, stuffing me into the little wooden companion-way: “You ain’t going to need no dinghy nor no lifejackets neither…. Now put your feet on the rungs.”

So I went down. I went down heavily, a man of oilskins and battered joints, while Jomo stayed kneeling in the open companionway with his arms folded and his chin on his arms—“I got to see this,” I heard him say over his shoulder—watching until my feet touched something solid and I fell around facing the cabin and managed to hold myself upright with one hand still on the ladder.

Pots and pans and beer bottles were rolling around on the floor. Two narrow bunks were heaped high with rough tumbled blankets and a pair of long black rubber hip boots. Little portholes were screwed tightly shut, the exhaust of the gasoline engine was seeping furiously through a leaking bulkhead, and in front of me, directly in front of me and hanging down from a hook and swaying left and right, a large black lace brassiere with enormous cups and broad elasticized band and thin black straps was swaying right and left from a hook screwed into the cabin ceiling.

“Jomo,” I said, “what’s that?”

“Never you mind what it is. Just leave it alone.”

Water on the portholes, stink of the engine, rattle of tin and glass going up and down the floor, long comfortable endless pendulum swinging of her black brassiere and: “But, Jomo, what about the owner?”

“Don’t you worry about the owner. She’s coming back to get that thing. Don’t worry.”

And then: “Jomo. I’m going to be sick…"

“Well, hot damn, just hike yourself up here on deck,” laughing over his shoulder, gesturing, then scowling down at me
again through the dodging companionway, “just drag ass, now, I can’t let you puke all over my cabin.”

I got my head and shoulders up through the hole and into the open air in time to see Captain Red and Cassandra sitting side by side on the thwart and opening our brown paper bag of sandwiches, got there in time to see the wax paper flying off on the wind and one white sandwich entering the big red mouth and the other white sandwich entering Cassandra’s mouth. Then they were smiling and chewing and I was hanging my head into darkness that was like the ocean itself and trying to keep the vomit off the fresh yellow bulging breast of my borrowed oilskin coat.

Third occasion of my adult life when my own pampered stomach tried to cast me out. Third time I threw up the very flux of the man, and for a moment, only a moment in the darkness of a cold ocean, I couldn’t help remembering the blonde prostitute on Second Avenue who held my forehead in the middle of the night and shared my spasms, because now I was stuffed into oilskins and slung up in a tight companionway and retching, vomiting, gasping between contractions, and there was no one to hold my forehead now. But it was the sea that had done this to me, only the wide sea, and in the drowsy and then electrified intervals of my seasickness I knew there would be no relief until they carried me ashore at last.

Red was standing in front of Cassandra now, my head was rolling, for some reason Jomo was at the wheel and the sea, the wide dark sea, was covered with little sharp bright pieces of tin and I saw them flashing, heard them clattering, clashing on all sides of the
Peter Poor.
The drops on my chin were tickling me and I couldn’t move; I felt as if I had been whacked on the stomach with a rolled-up newspaper soaked in brine.

Then blackness. Clap of pain in the head and blackness. Mishap with the boom? Victim of a falling block? One of the running lights shaken loose or a length of chain? But I knew full well that it was Bub because my eyes returned suddenly to tears and sight returned, settled again into bright images of the yellow oilskin, the hook at the wheel, the stern half-buried and
shipping water, and somehow
I accounted for them and knew suddenly what had become of Bub, could feel him where he crouched above me on the cabin roof and held upraised the old tire iron which they used as a lever to start the engine with.

But no sooner had I worked it out, that Bub had struck me on the head with the tire iron, than I saw the rock. Red, Cassandra, and then behind them the long low shelf of rock covered with a crust of barnacles and submerged every second or two in the sea, and we were wallowing and drifting and slowly coming abeam of the rock which looked like the overturned black petrified hull of some ocean-going vessel that would never sink.

Had it not been for Crooked Finger Rock I might have done something, might have reached around somehow and caught Bub by the throat and snatched away the tire iron and flung it at Red. Somehow I might have knocked Red down and taken over the
Peter Poor
and sailed us back to safety before the squall could threaten us from another quarter. But I saw the rock and heard the bell and Captain Red and Cassandra were posed against the rock itself, in my eye were already on the rock together, were all that remained of the
Peter Poor
and the rest of us. So I could only measure the rock and measure Red and wait for the end, wait for the worst.

I didn’t want to drown with Bub, I didn’t want Cassandra to survive with Red, and so I watched the hard black surface of the rock and swarthy bright yellow skin of the man, could only stare at the approach of the rock and at what the old man was doing. Jomo had let go the wheel and was watching too.

Because Cassandra was sitting on the edge of the thwart with her head thrown back and her hands spread wide inside the puffy tight yellow sleeves, and because the rust-colored skirt was billowing and I could see the knees and the whiteness above the knees which until now had never been exposed to sun, spray, or the head-on stance of a Captain Red, and because Red had thrown open the stiff crumpling mass of his yellow skins and was smiling and taking his hands away.

“There ’tis,” he said.

And that’s when I should have had the tire iron to throw, because
there it was and I saw it all while Cassandra, poor Cassandra, saw only Red.

Because she looked at Red, stared at him, and then pulled the string yet gave no sign that she knew the black sou’wester was gone or that she cared—but I did, I watched it sail up, roll over, shudder, actually land for a moment on the rock, slide across the rock, drop from sight—and then she pulled at the knot of the pale blue kerchief and held the idle tip of it between two fingers for a moment and then let it go. Drop of blue already a quarter mile astern and the hair a little patch of gold in the wind, the sun, the spray, and the white face exposed to view.

“No, no,” I said thickly, because she had reached out her hand—bobbing, swaying, undisturbed—and had drawn it back and was extending it again and Red was waiting for her.

“Cassandra,” I mumbled, “Cassandra,” but the buoy began to toll and Bub hit me again with the tire iron. So I went down and took her with me, pulled her down into my own small comer of the dark locker that lies under the sea, dragged her to rest in the ruptured center of my own broken head of a dream. Waxed sandwich wrappings, empty brown paper bag, black sou’wester, kerchief—all these whistled above her, and then I was a fat sea dolphin suspended in the painful silence of my green underseas cavern where there was nothing to see except Cassandra’s small slick wide-eyed white face lit up with the light of Red’s enormous candle against the black bottom, the black tideless root, of Crooked Finger Rock.

The squall came down, I know, because once I opened my eyes and found that I was lying flat on my back in my oilskins on the floor of the cabin, was wedged into the narrow space between the bunks and was staring up at the open companion-way which was dark and filled with rain. The rain beat down into the cabin, fell full on my face, and I could hear it spattering on the pots and pans, driving into the piles of blankets thrown into the bunks. The black brassiere was circling above my head and lashing its tail.

We were offshore, three or four miles offshore in a driving squall. We pitched, reeled, rolled in darkness, one of the rubber
hip boots fell out of the starboard bunk and down onto my stomach and lay there wet and flapping and undulating on my stomach. At least something, I thought, had saved us from a broadside collision against Crooked Finger Rock.

And later, much later, I awoke and found that they had hoisted me into the port bunk, dumped me into the bunk on top of the uncomfortable wet mass of blankets. I felt the toe of the other rubber boot in the small of my back, the tight sou’wester was still strapped to my head. And awake I saw the low and fading sun on the lip of the wet companionway, felt the tiny hand on my arm and managed to raise my eyes.

“Skipper? Feeling a little better, Skipper? We’re coming into port now, aren’t you glad?”

Wet, bright. Uncovered. The small white face that had been cupped in the determined hand of unruly nature. Little beads of sea violence in the eyelashes. Wet bright nose. Wet lips. Bareheaded, smooth, drenched, yellow skins open at the little throat, hair still smacking wet with the open sea and sticking tight and revealing the curve of her little sweet pointed skull. And smiling, Cassandra was smiling down at me. But she was not alone.

“Red—Captain Red—has been teaching me how to sail. Skipper.”

And moaning and licking my sour lips: “Yes, yes. I’m sure he has, Cassandra. That’s fine.”

The Old Man of the Sea, timeless hero of the Atlantic fishing fleet, was standing beside her with his pipe sizzling comfortably and the blood running back into the old channels, and I knew that I could not bear to look at him and knew, suddenly, why everything felt so different to me where I lay on the tumbled uncharitable blankets in the wet alien bunk. The sea. The sea was flat, smooth, calm, the wind had died, the engine was chugging so slowly, steadily, that I began to count the strokes.

“Ahoy,
Peter
Poor!” came the far-off sound of Miranda’s voice, and I knew that Cassandra was right and that we were heading into port, heading in toward our berth at the rotten jetty. Peace at last.

But then: “Skipper? Are you well enough to show Red what you have on your chest? I’d like him to see it if you don’t mind.”

Resisting, mumbling, begging off, trying to push her little hand away, but it was no use of course and she peeled away the layers and smoothed out the hairs with her own white fingers until the two of them leaned down together—two heads close together—and looked at me. Their ears were touching.