The Watery Part of the World (15 page)

A buck-toothed boy wearing a dirty apron and a pencil stub behind his big ear was in front of her with his little pad. It had been years since she'd been in a restaurant. She had nearly forgotten how it worked.

She nodded at the man on the stool next to her.

“What he's having, I guess,” she said.

The boy blinked and slid his nervous eyes to her neighbor's plate, then looked at her with his open, pimply face.

“Looks good enough to eat,” she added.

“Cheeseburger steak,” he nearly yelled, printing it out slowly in big blocks across his pad. He was gone, the swinging kitchen doors batting up a breeze as she forgot to tell him, Bring me some sweet tea.

Five minutes later a replica of the plate next door arrived in the boy's shaky hands. She made him nervous, plainly. He'd gone away and bent down beneath the counter but was back with a sweat-beading bottle of beer.

“I didn't order that,” she said.

The boy shrugged a bony shoulder at the man next to her.

“What he's having. That's what you said.”

“I meant food.”

He stared, dejected, at the beer. “But it's done been opened.”

Maggie sighed. “I reckon between the two of us we can find someone to drink it.”

“Yeah, but he'll make me pay for it out of my wages and—”

“I'll pay for it, shug. Bring me some sweet tea.”

He shot off without a word. The steak was so tough and tasteless she smothered her plate in ketchup. Chewing, Maggie felt her eyes watering, her throat closing. What in the world was she doing across over here, eating a hamburger steak like she had a clue? The horror she felt then was crippling, a seizing so much worse than nausea or backache, for such things passed but this futility stretched itself thinly out across time continuous, it remained in her blood like something handed her by God, a part of her, unshakeable, nothing to do but muddle through it. Only a few things had she found would make it fade. One was a bask in her sun-warmed surf. Another was leaving off whatever she was doing and going down to the docks to see if she could find Woodrow, for Woodrow, even when he was in his most removed of moods, taught her some things. It wasn't what she naively used to call his quiet dignity, for Woodrow was not perfect, he had his faults, blind spots, resentments, hurts. No, it wasn't his strong silence but something more complicated she had no name for.

Woodrow was with his family now. She wasn't about to go
snooping around Colored Town asking directions to Crawl's, where Sarah would treat her like a stray cat.

Everything caught up with her then: the sneaking away, the useless suitcase, the sun reflecting off the water, hot salty wind. Sweat streaked down her sides, dampening her dress. Her throat was rusted shut. Where was that boy with her sweet tea? She felt the men staring, heard the stools creek as they swiveled her way.

One sip of beer to tide her over until her tea came. She curled her hand around the bottle, shocked by its iciness against the oppressive air of the diner.

And then it was the next afternoon, and Maggie held her head in her hands, staring at a fish hook floating balefully in an inch of water in the bottom of the boat, which rocked wildly, setting off a lurch in her stomach, as Woodrow helped Sarah onto the seat beside her. Maggie could not lift her head. Snippets of the last twenty-four hours arrived out of sequence and truncated by thunderous pain in her forehead, lobe, stomach, pride, what little dignity she'd ever had. Sarah, scrunched tight on the seat beside her, felt towering and rigid compared to Maggie's doleful slump. Somewhere in the middle of the sound, out of sight of both mainland and island she both dreaded and longed for, she would collapse from shame into Sarah's lap. Sarah would hold her shoulders, stroke her dirty white-lady hair. Would not say a word. Would let her cry and babble and even drool onto her skirt while the piecemeal images took slow root in a murky sequence.

Beers appearing on the salt-strewn counter before her, half-eaten
and abandoned cheeseburger steak pushed away and heaped with cigarette butts from the smokers who'd pushed in close to engage her in wild trash talk, then, when she declared loudly after four or five bottles of sweaty beer what she would not do to get her hands on some sweet homemade wine, invited her over to some old boy's body shop where he had him a little something set up. Sweet as mother's milk was this wine of his. She remembered sort of thinking as she gathered her father's oiler around her shoulders and stumbled to the bathroom that this was it, dividing line; if she went for the wine she would lose everything she'd worked for, she'd never get him back, her life would be over. But then, she'd never had a chance. Never even had a plan. Come across with a trunk filled with seashells and photographs and eat hamburger steak? The thought of it shamed her into leaving the grill, three drunk fishermen in tow. When they arrived at the body shop, home of sweet-as-mother's-milk wine, the day grew dimmer, the memories disassociated. More men standing around wide doors wheeled open to expose the bays where dented cars sat ignored. Someone handed her a tumbler, the wine sweet as threatened. Glen Campbell on the radio. He was a lineman for the county. A crowd of men coming and going, Maggie the only girl and not a girl, a grown woman too old to be laughing and grabbing cigarettes out the mouths of smelly fishermen in off the water on a day grown too hot to fish. She'd let slip back at the grill that she was over from the banks and nearly all the men had family somewhere up the chain or had fled the banks themselves, a whole lot
of Do you know I bet you know, though she did not bring herself to tell them she rarely got off her island except a few times a year to Meherrituck. She did not mention Boyd for the longest time. When she did, not one of the men claimed to know him. She thought this odd, given the fact that the Promise Land was filled with transplants from the banks and everyone knew everyone and there weren't but a dozen families over there anyway, someone was bound to know him, Y'all lying to me, she said as she began to suck the wine down like it was going to get her what she wanted, who she wanted, Y'all do too know Boyd, and someone asked her what he was to her and she smiled and said, Friend, slyly, and someone else said, What you doing getting friendly with a boy, try a grown damn man on for size and then there was some dancing and soon she found herself sandwiched between two men obviously eager to see her in the so-called office of the body shop which featured for furniture a sprung-cushioned seat torn from a bus, its Naugahyde ripped and patched with duct tape, the coiled springs visible between the worn cushion and uncomfortable as hell when they pushed her down atop it and began their zipper music which she drowned out with screams which they tried to silence by filling her mouth with their flesh.

She did what she had to do: used teeth to get out from under them. Remembering the taste of blood, metallic, sharp, she threw up over the side of the boat, Sarah holding her shoulders, stroking her hair as she heaved, offering her water when her stomach was
way empty, when she had nothing left inside her except shame, fear, and worse, the memory of what happened next.

Tearing crazy drunk and disheleved through the streets of the Promise Land, screaming his name. Everywhere children and dogs. Her dress torn, her eye blackening, and a little blood staining her cheeks. Who knew where her suitcase was? She could not remember running from the body shop, how she managed to elude four drunk men, three or four more in the work bays; she could only surmise they let her go out of fear. She could imagine, later, that they had nothing at all to fear, for all they had to say, what they surely would have said had she managed to end up in the police station to press charges against instead of the opposite,
She wanted it, hell, she asked for it, she knew what the story was once we left out of the grill, she promised us all a slice,
on and on in the impudent imagery of men talking about sex, slices, pieces, pokes, lays, all their idiotic words for things they didn't understand.

And someone—a stunned mailman—told her where he lived. What he did not tell her was that he had moved in with his sister and her family. She found out quickly enough, knocking the door nearly down, crying out for her Boyd. The door slivered open and a woman holding a sleeping child, who favored Boyd in the set of the eyes and the slope of the nose, took one look at her face and shut and bolted the door. Which did not make Maggie go away as desired. Made her bang louder, call his name in a register so low and wild with want and need that it set dogs to howling, touched
off a siren even. Which drew closer. Which stopped in the street in front of her.

At the police station she went slack. The wine began to wear off and she slipped into a near catatonic state. Soon and swift came the shame. There was one boy policeman who talked to her sweetly enough to get the name of Woodrow out of her, and then Crawl. He wrote it down on a sheet of paper and went away to confer with his higher-ups and in a few minutes came back to the cell where they said they were holding her for her protection (for when she told them what had happened at the body shop they went a little easier on her, treated her a bit differently than when she was simply drunk, disorderly, disrupting the peace of the Promise Land) and said to her, “Captain says this is some nigger.”

“Captain ought to know there's another name for them.”

“You sure now, ma'am?”

Maggie looked up at the boy. He seemed younger and very far away.

“Sure about another name?”

“Sure you wanting us to call this fellow?”

“Fellow is an improvement. He's a man. It's his daddy brung me over here, and if I know Crawl, it's his daddy will come and get me out of this goddamn oven.”

“You need to be watching your language,” said the boy policeman.

“Y'all need to be arresting those drunks that tried to kill me.”

“Hey now,” he said in a voice she assumed he felt was soothing. “No one tried to kill you.”

“You were there?”

The boy looked at his sharply shined police-boy shoes. “I'll call this man if you sure you want me to.”

“It's call him or stay here. I imagine we'd both prefer you call him.”

For the couple hours it took Woodrow to arrive, she lay sweating and shaking on the bunk. She asked for water but no one tended to her. Shaking, retching, nearly dying of thirst, she realized that the moment she gave them Crawl's name they assumed she really did go down to the body shop with the idea of, as her escorts said as they held her down on the bus-seat sofa, fucking the lot of them six ways to Sunday, for what woman innocent of such charges would call a nigger to come pick her up out of jail?

She imagined they treated Woodrow even worse when he arrived. She knew they subjected him to all kinds of questions, treated him as if he were her pimp. She knew also, though not from anything he said for he said nothing to her about it, ever—she knew that the things they said to him got away with him, hurt him, deeply.

B
ACK ON THE ISLAND
in the slow wretched weeks after her return, what got away with her the worst, what kept her eyes to the ground and her cheeks streaked with dampness, was not
anger at the men who'd had their drunken way with her, or the thought of what Boyd felt when he came in off the water that day to hear from his sister about the crazy old woman liked to beat her door down calling his name. What she'd done to Woodrow—Sarah too—came in time to cause her mind to switch back and forth between two opposite notions: thereafter she would never venture farther from home than the post office (for it was easy to blame for the terror that seized her that day at the lunch counter
not
the way she had of thwarting over and again some slim shot at contentment, but instead the wider world, the vast and un-confined lie that had seduced so many before her starting with the first white child born on these shores) or, more terrifying but maybe more what she deserved, she needed to leave again, and this time for good.

Woodrow'd been sweet enough to carry her across. Sarah'd stroked her wet forehead as she heaved over the side of the boat. Now neither of them could quite raise their gaze higher than her waist when she encountered them on the lane. She could not bear this eye-avert for the rest of her life.

But instead of Maggie having to leave, everyone else left. What it came down to was the three of them sitting on the steps of the church trying to figure out what in the world's a blow-dryer. Sarah dead and gone, Crawl nearly given up on ever getting his daddy away from his white women. Even the Tape Recorders skipping a season now, Dr. Levinson too old to go without power and light for the three days or else sick of the mosquitoes, or maybe he was
sick of hearing Whaley tell the same old stories. Maggie never thought she'd miss the Tape Recorders, but when they did not come that year she thought, Hell, now that everybody's gone and most of them dead, now that it was only the three of them left of this island, she might could tell the real story of her life.

But no one was interested in this story. Least not Whaley, who pieced it together from folks coming and going across the sound. Maggie sure didn't volunteer it, though in some ways she did not have to say a word. She'd disappeared for two days, Whaley knew Woodrow to be over in Morehead fetching Sarah, she knew Boyd lived over in the Promise Land, she wasn't so dumb at math that she couldn't add. She liked numbers, her prices, what things cost. Plus all she had to do was look at Maggie to know the whole sordid story.

Maggie went about trying to forget again, tried all the things she'd tried and failed before: prayer, work, endless hours in the after-supper surf. The village was overrun by ghosts. Sometimes Maggie would wander down to the schoolhouse and find her seat on the third row, sit and listen to teaching sentences until the room and finally the entire island filled with all those who'd fled after the storms came battering. Mostly, though, she just accepted the way things were now. Tourists came over now of a weekend, O'Malley Senior had started up a damn near business ferrying them round-trip from Blue Harbor. They brought cameras and took pictures of the two old white women too stubborn to leave and their colored protector. They asked questions, silly and maybe
even a little mean, How y'all stand these mosquitoes, how come you stayed when everybody else fled this godforsaken place? The undertow of their curiosity seemed to Maggie judgmental if not contemptuous. She and Whaley and Woodrow were becoming a kind of freak show, one of those quaint stories about human resilience Maggie sometimes read aloud from the Norfolk paper. They smiled, waved, stood for the pictures, but underneath pasted smiles lurked the ways they got away with each other. Only three of them left on this island. Why could they not put it aside?