The Boy in His Winter (17 page)

“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.

W
E ENTERED THE
I
NLAND
P
ASSAGE
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.

O
UR LAST DELIVERY ON THE
I
NLAND
P
ASSAGE
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.

“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! H
OME OF
E
ASY
C
HAIRS FOR
L
AZY
B
OYS
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.

A
T
C
HESAPEAKE
C
ITY
, 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.