The Boat (20 page)

He doused the lantern and turned onto his side.

Easier in his mind, he slept.

~ ~ ~

John Smith gripped the rope in his teeth and swam toward the random bits of light on
Flyboy
. He was a strong swimmer; he’d been around water his whole life. He knew how to keep his breathing even, his muscles calm and tendons relaxed.

The water was cool but the air was warm. Fine for swimming. The rowboat seemed to have no weight at all. His forehead stung where the salt water soaked into the stitched line across his forehead. But even that felt good, in its own way. It was cleaning the cut. Keeping it free from infection. That’s what his old man had always said, anyway.

Swimming like this reminded him of his dad. They’d fished and swum and sunned themselves on the flat rocks of the jetty, just like seals. That’s what Dad always said to him. “We’re just like seals, Mikey, you know that? Just look at us!” He’d turn and dive, his feet breaking the water and splashing Mikey in the face then he’d come back up, throwing his head back to clear the shiny black hair from his eyes. He’d grin, his white teeth shining and Mikey would stare, blank faced, water running into his eyes. He’d paddle and paddle to stay in place, trying to understand the flash of white teeth. Sometimes he would bare his own teeth in imitation. Sometimes Dad laughed when Mikey did this; sometimes he did not.

~ ~ ~

He had to go past ThreeBees to reach
Flyboy
. He changed to an even breaststroke so that no part of him breaks the waterline except his head. The breaststroke is the quietest stroke he knows. It is also the slowest. As he swims, his mind drifts again to a time he had been little and his name had been Mikey and they lived on (almost literally) the ocean. Back to when it was always hot and the bad times hadn’t started.

~ ~ ~

Fishing. Mikey had felt good when he and Dad fished. Dad praised him because Mikey didn’t mind putting the small fish, the bait fish, onto the hook. Mikey had been little little–two? or maybe three, but he could recall the memories with perfect clarity, any time he wanted to. He looked down, and there was a long, shiny minnow struggling in his little hand. The fish was both cold and deceptively muscular, and Mikey could feel the minute ripples of its scales as they come apart and come together as the fish bends and twists.

He put the hook through the minnow’s mouth, right where Dad had showed him. He liked the hook going in, the breaking of the tough skin, the extra contractions of the little fish. It shined and glittered in the sun. Some of the scales came off in his hand. Mikey bared his teeth at the minnow.

Dad told him the way to catch the bigger fish was with the little fish. That was bait. Three year old Mikey had understood the concept with a clarity that his dad would have found astonishing. But Mikey hadn’t started talking yet. So his dad didn’t know anything he was thinking.

When they caught the bigger fish, Mikey would feel a pleasant sizzle of anticipation in his stomach. The knife would come out and Dad would put the knife right under the bigger fish’s head and slice straight down. Mikey could simultaneously feel the knife in his own hand, the resistance and then lack of resistance as it broke into the cold skin, and a tingling feeling in his chest and stomach of the knife going in.

Is that what a knife going in felt like? First a tingle and then a hot tickle lower down, right above his pee-pee. He’d squirm a little, especially if was a really big fish, especially if it curled tightly under the knife.

“It’s okay, Mikey, they don’t feel it. Fish don’t work like that.”

It had been disappointing to hear but ultimately he decided that Dad was wrong. Such muscular contractions meant one thing: pain. Good pain. Tingling and exciting.

They would take the fish back to their little house on the beach and Dad would say, “Mom is gonna be happy with this lot!” and sometimes she was but sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes his mom stared at him and she didn’t bare her teeth and she didn’t blink, she just stared. At those times, Mikey would stare back until it seemed his mom’s eyes had become like the fish’s eyes…blind and flat. Dead.
Bait mom
, he’d say to himself, in the secret confines of his mind. Then he would bare his teeth at her.

His mom never touched him if she could help it, but Dad did; they played all the time. He told Mikey that Mikey was lucky to have a young dad, a fun dad. When they swam together, his dad would tickle him, grab his ankle, grab him by the waist and throw him up and up. Mikey would splash back down into the water, sometimes fighting for breath, choking on a lungful of water and Dad would be laughing. Mouth wide, hahaha and weird breath.

Mikey tried it sometimes at night. He was up a lot when his parents slept in their bed. He’d go to the little bathroom downstairs off the kitchen and drag a chair to the sink and stand at the mirror. He would open his mouth wide and say “haha” and “hahaha” and try to make the weird breath. It didn’t sound the same so he stopped doing it.

Sometimes he stood and watched his parents as they slept. They kept their eyes closed for a very long time. Mikey didn’t know how they did that. He tried, but his eyes always wanted to stay open. Mikey didn’t have control over his eyes. They would burn with too much air and too little sleep. He would rub his eyes and stand at his mom’s bedside. Her mouth would hang open and he would stare at her cheek and think about the minnow. The hook going in. Sometimes it made a little ‘pop’ sound when it did.

The cold fish blood.

People blood would not be cold, though. He knew that already. Because people were not fish. His dad said.

When he turned four, they put a box on the floor and told him it was his birthday present. The box moved and he didn’t like that. He knew boxes should not move. He kicked at it and Dad said, “Whoa, whoa, hold on there, Mikey, let me show you what’s in the box.” His dad and mom had exchanged a glance that Mikey could not read. They were always doing things with their eyes…with their eyebrows…that Mikey didn’t understand.

Dad opened the box and a puppy was in it. It had brown wavy fur, brown eyes, and a brown nose. “That’s a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Mikey, and he’s yours, son. You can even name him.”

Mikey had looked from his dad to his mom. She had her hands put together and pressed under her chin. She was not baring her teeth but she had stretched lips. And water leaked from her eyes. “Isn’t he a cute puppy, Mikey? Isn’t he sweet? Everyone loves puppies, Mikey, and you will, too. It will make you…happy. Puppies make people happy, honey.”

Mikey had looked at the puppy a little while longer, waiting for happy (whatever that was) and finally Dad took the puppy out of the box. It had come to where Mikey stood. Its tail was moving and it was jumping. Its pink tongue hung loosely from its brown lips.

Mikey kicked it. Hard.

His mom was yelling as his dad swept him up and carried him down the hall into his room. She yelled after them, “I
told
you! I
told
you there was something wrong with him!” Her voice was weird like she was choking.

His dad had put him on the bed and then he had paced back and forth, back and forth. He did it so long that Mikey decided to pick up one of his books instead of watching his dad pace. The pacing was boring.

So he’d begun to slide from the bed, his eyes on the book he wanted, when his dad picked him up by the arms and yelled into his face, shaking him roughly. “You can’t
hurt
things! That’s just a defenseless puppy! What is
wrong
with you, Mikey?”

Mikey saw the anger and fear in his dad’s eyes and came to a conclusion. They hurt the fish all the time; hurting fish was okay. But hurting a puppy was not okay, most definitely not.

“You can’t hurt puppies, Daddy,” Mikey said. Like a foreigner trying to learn a language by ear, repetition would become his Rosetta Stone–though not much repetition was ever needed; Mikey was very bright.

His dad lowered him back to the bed, mouth agape. “Mikey, you spoke?” It was both a statement and a question, as if he was trying to convince himself of something.

Mikey nodded.

“Cath! Honey, come in here!” Joy and fright were uncomfortable companions in his tone. They would become more comfortable as time wore on–Mikey’s actions would demand it.

His mom came to the door, holding the puppy in her arms. Her lips were tight. Puckered.

“Say it again, Mikey, say what you said before.”

Mikey looked from his dad to his mom.

“You can’t hurt puppies, Daddy,” Mikey said. His voice was tiny but his pronunciation and diction were perfect. It was as though he’d been speaking for years. His parents stared at him in amazement. They’d had him to a doctor once but the doctor had said he would speak when he chose to. There was nothing physically wrong with him. That advice had cost them fifteen dollars that they didn’t have.

Mikey’s parents were poor, very poor. Mikey knew this from overhearing them talk together when they thought he was asleep. His mom wanted to go back to a place called California where she had been a little girl, or to New Jersey where Daddy had been a little boy…but his dad wanted to stay where they were: Mexico.

They stayed in Mexico.

When he turned five, his dad started to teach him things from books. He said that Mikey would go to school right here at home, right in the kitchen, isn’t that cool? Mikey didn’t know if it was cool or not, but he knew to nod. He knew by now that certain phrases–certain tones–demanded that answering nod. He was learning to parrot.

Mikey would study at the little round table. When he felt his dad’s eyes on him, he would reach over and run his hand over Chief’s head. Dad liked that. He liked when Mikey petted Chief.

Chief was big now, with wavy brown fur that felt coarse under Mikey’s hand. The muscles of his brown head would jump and squeeze when Chief panted or twitched his ears and Mikey liked to feel the muscles, although he didn’t know yet that that was what they were called. Mikey had an intense desire to
see
whatever it was that jumped under his hand and how it made Chief’s ears move. How would he get to see?

Chief liked having a hand on his head. Mikey didn’t know why–himself, he hated to be touched.

Mom worked at a hotel, helping people by making sure their rooms were nice and clean. But then she lost her job. His mom and dad fought and fought for three weeks and they ate more and more fish until one night, his dad said, “Fine, we’ll go back to Jersey, then you’ll see, Cath. We’ll be no better off. We’ll be
worse
off.
Much
worse.”

“Because you’ll have to get a
job
? Is that what’s killing you? That you’ll have to
work
for once?”

“I’m young! I don’t want to waste my life doing a job I’ll hate! Do you want to be like your parents? Sweating yourself into an early grave? You think that’s cool?”

The fight ended the way all the bad ones did: violently. They hit each other and pulled hair and spit and punched and screamed. Sometimes, Mikey would come out of his room to watch. When they were to this point, they never noticed him.

Often there was blood. Mom or Dad or both would have bloody noses or sometimes cuts on their faces. They would have bruises, black eyes, occasionally a broken finger or toe. Then they would strip and do something else. Sometimes it was more violent, more intense than the fighting. They breathed heavily and moaned and cursed. There was more hair pulling. Mikey didn’t know what they were doing. But there was something about it that excited him…especially if there was already blood.

They moved to New Jersey and lived in his dad’s parents’ house. Mikey’s grandmom and granddad.

Mikey didn’t understand his grandparents at all. He didn’t understand the things he had to do. He didn’t know what was expected of him.

Then there was school. And church. And cold. And shopping. And clothes and shoes. Even the food was different. Nothing Mikey had ever had before, things like hot chocolate. Noodles and cheese. Peanut butter and jelly. And the fish was covered in a crunchy crust and shaped like a plank and covered in cold red from a bottle. And it didn’t even taste like fish.

Mikey stopped talking again for a little while. But his granddad didn’t like that. His grandmom took him to another doctor, in a big building with lots of other people around, other kids. And they had looked at him and into him with lights and things on scopes and prodded him and took his picture…

And they told his grandmom that he would talk when he was ready. There was nothing physically wrong with him.

Eventually he did talk again. He was learning. Learning his new life.

He learned to suss out who was important. He learned that the one who made the decisions was the one you wanted to be near. He never played with Dad anymore because his dad was…weak. Reduced in some way that Mikey couldn’t yet articulate but that had to do with the fact that his dad lived in the basement and rarely came out. He yelled a lot and Granddad had to go down and make him be quieter. Then sometimes his dad would cry. But Granddad ignored the crying as though it was beneath him. Not worthy of notice. Mikey liked that. He liked Granddad because Granddad was mostly one way: cold. Mikey appreciated it. It was easy to understand.

Eventually his mom left and then some time after that, his dad left, too. Sometimes he came back to visit and would ask did Mikey want to come live with him? But Mikey always said no. Mikey
endured
his dad’s visits…nothing more. It was just time passing as far as Mikey was concerned.

Then his dad stopped visiting, too. By that time, Mikey was eleven and in the fifth grade. School, he found, was no different than anything else–it was just a matter of finding a solid spot to stand and letting everything occur around you.

Mikey got along okay.

Then Chief died.

Chief had stayed with Mikey. His dad had said you shouldn’t separate a boy and his dog. Mikey had been bewildered by that but had filed it with every other bewildering thing that people said and did.