The Seas (3 page)

Despite all the evidence in the house of objects surviving the people who once owned them, my mother and grandfather agree that if they hold on to everything their chances of surviving are better. I don’t subscribe to this line of thinking though I can imagine one situation where all the debris in our house could be useful. That is when the ice caps are done melting and our house is underwater, then I could see my grandfather and my mother fashioning a raft out of what they once owned, a couch or a table and climbing aboard, paddling the raft towards the Rocky Mountains and away from the incoming tide.

I keep my room mostly empty except for a bed, a dresser, and a few pictures on the wall. One picture is of a polar explorer who, during World War I, left Elephant Island on a far smaller boat than the boat he’d arrived on. The picture is tattered but I like it because the explorer was so brave. He left his marooned crew behind where their ship had been frozen solid, stuck in the pack ice. In a small launch he went for a rescue. He sailed into a cove on South Georgia Island in the Antarctic where he ate some albatross meat after not having eaten meat in a long time. He crossed a highly crevassed and dangerous glacier with brass screws taken from his launch fixed to the soles of his shoes so he’d not slip on the ice. Though he still did slip. In thirty-six hours he covered only forty miles. After the first hour or two his brain began to repeat words in the same patterned battering his boat had suffered. Oddly, he felt that the words did not grow out of him but came from some exterior source. The words were, “The girl who sold seashells will someday rot in hell. The girl who sold seashells will someday rot in hell.” The words repeated and repeated until their stresses were highly over-accentuated and he could not stop and in fact found himself marching across the crevassed tundra in time to the pounding of the words.

I like the picture because it is the same with me only the words are, “He loves me not. He loves me not. He loves me not.” I don’t mean God or my father. I mean Jude the sailor, the mortal that I love.

Jude came home from the war in Iraq a year and a half after the president had declared the war was over. He wasn’t even supposed to be there at all. He’d already served three years and seven months of his term, but when the war started he decided to stay on for a bit. He needed the money. He doesn’t own a fishing boat and so he didn’t have much choice as there is almost no other way for men to make money here.

When he finally got home we took a walk out on the small part of the bay that freezes every year. Since I was older than when he had left and had been pining for him the entire time he was gone, writing him love letters every single week, I thought that the purpose of the walk would be that he was finally planning on collapsing on the ground before me, planning to bring his lips to my winter boots and make out with them, writhing with love. This however turned out not to be the purpose of the walk. Jude was war-torn. He was distracted and I found that I had to make eye contact with him before I started talking or else he might not realize that I was speaking to him. Since he got home he’d been drinking a lot and taking some pills that an Army social worker had gotten for him when he was still enlisted. I was a bit frustrated as he’d been gone a year and a half and there were lots of things I wanted to tell him and this made it hard to. “Jude.” Wait for eye contact. He looks. Continue talking. “When you were gone the bay didn’t freeze and they said it was because of global warming but I don’t think so. I think it was because I’d come down here looking across the ocean to see where you went. I kept the ocean warm by just loving you. Can you imagine what—” A bird flew overhead and Jude turned his attention away. I lost him.

“I want to move to Mexico,” he said. “Or Canada. I don’t care which one.”

“Why? You didn’t kill anybody, right?”

A fisherman had cut a circular hole in the ice and we stood on either side. Jude reached down through the hole. He didn’t answer. “I went to the Middle East on board a supply ship that was carrying some Bradley fighting vehicles and some other shit. There were these holding stations in the bottom of the ship that were five stories below the surface of the ocean and so there was a strange pressure on your brain down there.”

“Like the bends?” I asked.

“No. Like the pressure of a ship full of supplies and soldiers who are off to war and are too scared to speak and so start screaming at the ocean after days out at sea. Down in the hold, the screams and yells echo. I swear to God, the hold holds onto the yelling and bounces it around,” he said.

Jude didn’t go to Mexico and he didn’t go to Canada. Instead he tore up his Social Security card while I watched. He thought that was a good idea until he was denied military disability because his body wasn’t wounded just his head. So he went down to the welfare office to apply, but the first document they wanted to see from him was his Social Security card. So Jude gave up on the government.

When Jude got home from Iraq he went back to his old job fishing. It doesn’t pay well but it does pay him in cash at the end of each day depending on what is caught. It’s what he used to do before he joined the Army. He’s good at it but if you don’t own your own boat it’s a very hard way to live.

“I already served my four years,” he said, “And so I thought about deserting,” he said. “Because I didn’t want to kill other poor people. I didn’t want anything to do with the war anymore. But if you desert the Army hires these guys called bounty hunters, brutal guys who hunt down and turn in AWOL soldiers for money. They throw you in a military prison that would make a regular prison look like a vacation resort. In a military prison you have no rights and the people guarding you are other soldiers so they really want to kill you for deserting. I didn’t have the spine for it but I thought about it everyday.”

Even though Jude is back from the war he still is not my boyfriend the way I thought he would be. But he stays close by and he takes care of me. When I need it, he’ll shake my hand with a twenty dollar bill folded up inside his palm. He passes me the money smiling like he’s a big-time crime boss or like he’s my father. When I come down to the docks to meet his boat he stands directly behind me, his shoulder and thigh touching mine so that an ex-con named Larry, who was sent to prison for arson though every one knows he also killed his girlfriend, will stop leering the way he does at anything female. Jude and I see each other everyday. Last week he brought me a miniature bouquet, like a bouquet for a mouse. It was one or two purple asters, their stems wrapped in the foil from a peppermint patty. Sometimes he comes by after noon, after the boat he fishes for comes in or else he’ll drop by before he goes out drinking or sometimes if he’s feeling badly he’ll make a howling sound, a coyote noise late, late at night outside my window. I’ll look down into the street at him and when he sees me he stops howling and just looks at me until he calms down. We don’t talk but stare at each other through the glass of the window. After fifteen minutes or so he usually goes home to bed.

Jude is in my kitchen watching me get lunch for my grandfather, a tin of tuna fish with some crackers soaked in the fish packing oil. My grandfather is in the living room typesetting his dictionary, like a crossword puzzle but a bit more involved. He is working on the etymology of the word “hold,” as in a ship’s hold. He’ll go back centuries, looking through old dictionaries, cross-referencing any usage, searching for the word’s birth. When I bring him his lunch I ask, “What have you found?”

“Well,” he says, “the word hold is Dutch in origin. It’s actually hol and shares a root with hollow.”

“That’s nice,” I say distracted by the way Jude is sitting on our kitchen stool with his legs gently parted.

“But even closer in origin,” my grandfather continues, taking a bite of the tuna fish, “is the word hell.”

I pass Jude in the kitchen and I can smell him. He has been drinking a bit. Still he smells good. “Come here, girl,” he says and he pulls me towards him so that I can feel his breath on my neck. Jude and I do not have any regular sort of relationship. He is not my boyfriend. He says he is too old to be my boyfriend. But he pulls me onto his lap. He breathes in my ear. He has never kissed me despite his kissing most girls who live here, this far north. Jude thinks he is too old for me. I think I could cut a strip of flesh from his upper arm and eat it.

“You smell like 3-in-One,” he tells me.

I think that is a compliment until I realize he means the appliance oil. I think on it a bit longer and open my neck up, 3-in-one. He holds me. He hollows me. He hells me.

He doesn’t talk about the women he goes out with and when I ask him he says, “But that’s got nothing to do with you and me.” That’s not the way I see it, and so eventually Jude gets drunk and then I ask him and then he tells me everything not just about the women but everything. “We did it in the basement of the ironworks,” he’ll say or “You know her husband doesn’t care what she does at night,” or, “Those cuts on my ribs are because I am trying to open gills before the flood comes.” So he doesn’t really have any secrets and he doesn’t really have any gills because where he cut himself scarred up with thick, white, foamy tissue and nobody could breathe through that.

Twice since he’s been back I have seen Jude walking with women who I know are his girlfriends. Once I saw Jude and a woman waiting outside the SeaScrubbers Laundromat. It was cold out but the woman and Jude stood outside. The woman was standing behind Jude and using her fingers like a comb through his hair. I watched for as long as I could until I began to imagine that she was yanking his hair out in clumps and dropping it on the sidewalk that was already filthy with dryer lint. I was so mad. I realized that if she actually did yank out Jude’s hair it would make me happy so I walked away. The second time I saw him with another woman, it was a different woman. I remember this one because Jude was sitting with her in the Reach Road Restaurant and they were sitting on the same side of a booth. The other bench was just empty, like they didn’t care what other people thought.

When I see him walking with women that I don’t know I feel how I am not a part of this town. I feel as though I were floating in the surf and saw him on dry land with another woman but when I swim to shore I realize too late that I don’t have legs but a big tail and then I am beached and suffocating and the people who live in town are poking me with a stick wondering, “What the hell is she?” I can’t breathe. When I see Jude with women that I don’t know I feel like my eyes are suffocating me. As though what I see is choking me. Jude’s girlfriends hurt me. They take my breath away and leave a mark like the bright blue residue on my eyes after flash photography. In the moment that I stop breathing the picture of whatever burned me becomes trapped. I’ll see a blue afterimage and it looks like Jude in a cheap bar with a woman cheaper than me.

I asked an opthalmologist for help. He comes to town once a month like the full moon. He is part of a traveling medical clinic paid for by the state for poor people. I thought that because of this he was probably stretched too thin. I worried he wouldn’t grasp the subtleties of my problem. When I called to make the appointment a tired nurse inquired, “Well, what seems to be the problem?” So I told her I was in love so badly that it was affecting my vision.

“Are you wasting my time?” she asked.

“No, Miss.” I realized too late that I should have said Ma’am instead of Miss.

“Well the doctor’s got an opening next Tuesday. Come then.”

On Tuesday there is a selection of old magazines in the state’s waiting room. Some are catalogs, some are for horse owners or women or amateur photographers or doctors and medical students. I take one of these with me into Examination Room B. After five minutes or so the doctor enters. He switches on a very narrow piercing light for looking into eyes with. He asks, “Well, what seems to be the problem?” So I tell him.

“I am in love and it is affecting my vision.” He looks to the left. He looks to the right. He clears his throat. He steps outside the examining room to perhaps consult a medical journal. He takes the opportunity to visit the patient in Examination Room A. I pick up the magazine where I left off. Inside, there is a story of an overweight hemophiliac and the danger his own weight poses. The hemophiliac bleeds without ever breaking his skin, bruises that slip loose and navigate between his skin and his flesh as though through the Erie Canal at night.

The article is breathtaking and so I see a blue afterimage of it crawl across the leather case of lenses. In ten minutes the doctor returns. I ask him, “Doctor, how is a hemophiliac like blue?”

He looks extremely puzzled. “Look, I’m an opthalmologist,” he says.

It is easy. Neither can stop letting go of red.

“We’ll just keep an eye on this situation,” he says. “See me in a month. My girl will make an appointment for you.”

I think the trouble with my eyes started because they don’t have enough pigment. They are no more colorful than ice with a little blue in them. Eyes are an exception to ocean, sky, and blood. Eyes can be blue where there is oxygen. That is a theory concerning my condition that I have yet to discuss with my opthalmologist.

The Seas, a motel where I sometimes chambermaid, sits a bit higher than the other motels so that its broad and weathered sign dominates much of its landscape. This motel is not popular with tourists because the largeness of its sign seems desperate and creepy.

The woman who owns the Seas named the rooms after different famous hurricanes and leaves cards in each room to describe the storm. It is creepy. So even if a French-Canadian couple wound up at the motel accidentally, chances are they would find it weird and not return the following summer.

The woman who owns the motel could sleep in a different room every night if she wanted to, but usually she stays close to Andrew or the Galveston Hurricane. That way, she told me, if the office phone rings she can hear the answering machine pick up through the walls. So much stillness through the day, she sits on the curb outside the line of empty rooms. She smokes. She’s not very old but the cigarettes help her to feel like she is.