The year I quit school, I was renting an apartment – actually the second story of a decrepit Victorian – on Silver Terrace. The house overlooked the river at the end of a cul-de-sac, and it wasn’t standing the test of time with any grace at all. The beams were splintered and punky in places, and in the thunderstorms, the cedar shingles whirled off it like dead leaves disappearing up a twister. I had a roommate, but he was away so much that I felt as though I lived alone, and that was fine with me.
Three-thirty, one Saturday morning in June, I was sitting in the apartment kitchen, drinking coffee brandy and enjoying the quiet after a long night behind the bar. Friday was payday at Wember Paper, and almost everyone who worked there seemed to pass through the Crystal Lounge sooner or later, even if it was only for a quick one on the way home to hand the paycheck over to the wife.
By Crystal standards, it’d been a moderate night. Ronnie Michaud had broken his nose on a Budweiser bottle, and Ray Leeds decked three cops in the parking lot before they thought to mace him, but the tips had been good, the way they usually are in a bar where working people drink. If I worked full-time for another six months, I’d have a big enough down payment to buy a house.
I knew Roger had arrived when Walker galloped in from the front room, growling low in his chest.
“Easy, buddy,” I said. I’ve had enough of that for one night.”
He sat down next to my chair and his heavy chain collar jangled. I rubbed the knobby bone on top of his head.
A brisk knock rattled the panes in the back door, and Roger let himself in. The blue-black early morning slipped over the sill with him. I scraped a wooden match and lit the burner under the coffee pot.
“Mornin’,” he said.
Even at sixty, my uncle wore a crewcut, tweedy gray now, and he toted his bowling-ball belly out in front of him like a trophy. He wasn’t any taller than five and a half feet, and his normal speaking voice was as subtle as the foghorn on Matinicus Rock. He lived in a tin-roofed shack on a hundred acres north of Skowhegan and he didn’t have to worry about who could hear him. There was only a pair of yellow Labs to talk to, anyway.
“Morning.” I pointed at the coffee pot. “Help yourself. I’ve got to get my stuff together.”
He sat down at the oak table and started to leaf through the National Geographic I’d been reading. I stepped across the hall through the door to my bedroom, and tripped over the comforter wadded up on the floor. When I spread it out over the mattress, a cotton bra fell and draped itself across my boot. I grinned - apparently Angie hadn’t missed it when she was getting dressed.
“You gonna be home tonight?” Yawning, she’d leaned her bird weight into my ribcage as I walked her to the back door at two or two-thirty. Her hair stank of stale cigarette smoke, as mine must have, and I wondered whether I wanted to see her again so soon. “I’ll cook dinner for you if you want.”
What I wanted right then was for her to be gone when Roger arrived.
“All right. But I don’t know what time we’ll be back. I’ll leave you the key, up here.” I patted the top of the door frame.
She’d kissed me and clumped down the stairs, her Dr. Scholls’ slapping against the wooden risers. I’d envied her. At least she was going to get some sleep today.
I rummaged through the closet and threw a few necessities into a small blue canvas bag: a spare reel, belt knife, a box of flies and a bottle of dex. My blood was slower than pulp-slurry and my eyes itched, but I’d planned this trip with Roger over a month ago, and I didn’t like to disappoint him. The windows clattered as I walked back into the kitchen. I tossed the bag by the door, next to my flyrod. Walker stood aloof from Roger, stiff-legged at the smell of other dogs in his domain. I turned off the stove and poured myself some coffee.
“Which way’s the tide this morning?” Since I lived about seventy miles from the coast, I didn’t normally worry about that. Roger chuckled.
“Coming in. But that won’t make any difference if we fish down through Kettlefish Cut.” He thumped his mug on the table and stood up and his orange canvas coat rustled as he zipped it over his belly. “You about ready to go?”
I poured the rest of the coffee into a wide-bottomed travel mug and rechecked the burner. It was early to tie Walker out, since he’d watchdog every noise he heard
until daylight, but I couldn’t leave him locked in the house all day, either. He dragged the chain down the steep stairs, hell-bent for the lilac bush at the corner of the neighbor’s house. Roger poked his pocket knife into one of the porch beams experimentally while I filled up the dog’s bowl with water.
“Dry rot. I hope the sills’re in better shape.” He folded the knife and stuck it back in his pocket.
“We be back by dinner time?”
“Oh hell yes. I’ve got a Power Squadron meeting in Farmington at eight-thirty.”
“I won’t leave him any food, then. The cats’ll just steal it.” Roger shrugged as if to say that was my problem. I picked up my duffle bag and locked the door; the porch swayed a little under our combined weight. He snorted when I tucked the key up over the door.
“Why the hell lock it if you’re going to do that?”
“John’s coming back from Georgia today, and we’ve only got the one key.”
Roger was halfway down the stairs already, and it was my turn to shrug. My uncle was a piece of work. He was also the only one of the relatives who’d always treated me as an equal, even when I was too young for it. That made me think he was a good man. He had no wife, he hunted and fished when he wanted, and only came to town for his books and groceries, and that made me think he had a good life. One of the reasons I was living in a mill town and tending bar was that I had my own notion of a good life to try out.
I didn’t remember it not being there, hung up in my mind like a favorite painting – the dream of a small farm, a dozen black-faced sheep and a dog, a plot out back with herbs and vegetables growing, and a white clapboard house with black shutters where I could drink tea and write poems, alone.
The dawn laid a cool hand on the back of my neck. I rumpled Walker’s ears as I passed him in the dark. A smell of chopped grass cloyed the air and stones ground coarsely under our feet as we walked out to the street. Roger never parked in the driveway, I suspect because it was only one car wide.
I clipped my fly rod into a rack he’d installed in the van, and climbed into the passenger’s seat, pushing Kevin, one of his Labradors, off into the back. We took a left onto Silver Street and drove down through town, past the Sentinel building and the Crystal and across the rusty iron bridge into Winslow to pick up 201.
The captain’s chair reclined, and I parked my feet up on the dashboard. Roger glanced over at me, but he didn’t say anything. I was wondering if Angie could tell how inexperienced I was. Except at the very beginning, when I couldn’t get my breath, I hadn’t felt clumsy, but I thought it might be obvious to someone who possessed certain knowledge when someone else didn’t understand it as well.
In Topsham, Roger pulled off the highway into a red and white drive-in with the dubious boast “LBJ Ate Here” painted on the roof. He hawked a little phlegm out of his throat.
“Coffee?”
I nodded and fished out a dollar. While he stood at the screened window doctoring his coffee with milk and sugar, I slipped one of the dexedrine out of my bottle and swallowed it dry. The taste of steel spread over my tongue.
The van’s engine popped and rumbled as we waited at a stoplight to get back on the highway. Roger looked at me sideways again.
“Had a telephone call from your mother last night.”
The windshield focused sunlight in my face like a lens. Sweat oozed out on my forehead and the metal flavor flooded my mouth, and bang, the speed kicked in and I was all the way awake.
“So?” My voice sounded loud, even to me.
“She thinks you should move back home and go to college.”
“Well, that’s not news.”
“She doesn’t want you to feel, and I quote, `imprisoned by one decision’.”
“She’s just afraid I’m not wearing any underwear. Dad say anything?”
“I didn’t talk to him. And you watch your mouth - that’s my sister you’re being snotty about.”
“When the hell did you start worrying about that?” I said.
“Just because I live alone doesn’t make me a hermit.” His anger surprised me; family wasn’t a big thing for him. I was hoping that he’d take my side, but I don’t think he believed I was serious about staying. I quoted him a Jim Harrison poem.
“`I want to die in the saddle, an enemy of civilization . .’”
His laugh boomed the walls of the van like a kettle drum and Kevin slid his golden head up under my arm. I scratched behind his ears. The older dog, Johnny, slept on in the pile of musty blankets in back.
“You’re too young to be an enemy of anything.”
I clammed right up at that, buttoned my lip, and kept it that way until we drove into Bristol.
Once we stopped inside the boatyard, the dogs jumped out of the truck and sprinted through the sea grass, stealing the chance to stretch their legs before they were cooped up again, on the boat. I slammed the van door hard behind me, picked up my duffle and followed them down toward the dock, leaving the cooler for Roger to carry. Pissed was too mild a word for the way I felt – I hadn’t yet learned how time dilutes emotion, how in an hour I wouldn’t be angry any more, how in a year or two, my parents might not be disappointed in me.
The yard owner’s son watched from a cliff above the dock as our boat stitched a course through the channel, among the nuns and the pot buoys painted in primary colors. Once we made it out to Kettlefish Cut, Roger throttled the engine back to trolling speed.
Sunlight soaked the pure blue sky, and the air was so clean it played tricks on my depth perception, which was used to the grubbier air of Waterville. The cedar-shingled cottages, the scrubby, sea-whipped pines, the cormorants fishing along both shores, all seemed much closer than I knew they were.
I rigged the fiberglass fly rod with a red and yellow Mickey Finn and cast the heavy line out into the sea. With the cork grip clamped in a holder, the weight of the water slowly drew the rod tip down in a deep parabola. I rolled my shoulders back and forth as the speed began to loosen its grip on my muscles. Roger tied on a chromed lead jig dressed in white marabou and tucked his own pole in the holder on the far side of the boat. He looked at my fly rod skeptically.
“I just want to see if this’ll work.” The anger suddenly disappeared, flushed out of my head by the breeze. Roger offered me a beer and I opened it and sat down with my back against the rail.
I wondered if he’d ever had a lover. All my other unmarried uncles and aunts had “friends” they brought to family functions, though the faces sometimes changed from one holiday to the next. Roger invariably showed up alone, unless you counted the dogs. My mother alluded briefly once to a girl he’d known in high school, but I doubted that he was enough of a romantic to give up on love because he’d lost out once. I think he’d just overdeveloped the habit of being alone.
The sun and the beer sank me in a doze. While Roger maintained our course with choppy corrections of the wheel, I lay back and shut my eyes, but the waves that slapped at the hull prevented me from falling completely asleep. I gave up finally, my eyelids gummed and my head throbbing slowly like a bell. I soaked a white terry hat in the bottom of the cooler and put it on; the icy water dribbled a pleasant shock down my spine.
Far astern, out where I judged the end of my fly line to be, a tinker mackerel suspended itself above the surface. The shredded ocean reflected a garish blue and white, the hues of the famous Hokusai print. As I watched, the fish dove into the top of a wave, but it must have missed the fly altogether - the arc of the rod didn’t alter at all.
That was all the action we had. By four o’clock, I barely had the energy to climb up over the gunwales onto the dock. Low tide had increased the pitch of the ramp, and I had to push down on the tops of my thighs to make any progress upward. My skin felt thick and greasy, as if I’d worked a Friday night without the air conditioning on.
Roger paid the owner while I piled gear into the van. I slumped in the captain’s chair, hoping I could sleep on the ride home.
As we drove off, Roger was silent, but my nerves were so raw I could hear him rooting around in his brain for words. I wondered if the sound of my voice might get him started.
“Well it was a nice day out there, even if we did get skunked.”
“Just don’t piss away your opportunities, son. They aren’t going to come along all that often.” His voice was musing, and gravelly. I wanted him to clear his throat, and I was too tired to guess what he was getting at.
“What do you mean?”
“Look. When I was nineteen, I wanted to be a veterinarian. I needed three hundred and fifty dollars more than what I had in the bank to pay for school. I could’ve worked two jobs that summer, but I didn’t, and by the next year, I was farming beans, just to make a living. Don’t you get to be sixty and have something stuck in your craw like that.” Knee-high corn flashed past in the dusk.
“I like the way you live.” That was as close as I’d ever get to saying that I loved him.
“It isn’t that great. Sometimes it’s lonesome as hell.”
That I didn’t have an answer for. Roger braked the van next to the curbstone at the end of my driveway, and I started to climb out. He tapped me on the bicep with the back of his hand.
“Hey. Call your mother?” It wasn’t an order as much as a request, a favor between friends. I grinned at him.
“Sure thing.”
“Good. See you.” Kevin leaped lightly into the seat I’d just vacated, and I grabbed my gear and slammed the door. The van rumbled off down Silver Terrace, and I dragged my aching body up the driveway, already feeling the cool cotton sheets underneath me.
A primer-black Pontiac was parked up on the grass, next to the lilac bush, and my pulse increased a little. Angie sat on the top step with Walker’s head across her lap, rubbing behind his ears with a strong, slow rhythm. His eyes were shut, in either canine ecstasy, or sleep. She shifted her legs on the steps and I caught a long flash of tanned thigh and white pants underneath her linen skirt. Then Walker’s eyes opened and his tail started thumping the porch.
“Hi.” She hunched her shoulders and smiled down at me uncertainly. A breeze feathered fine black hair away from her forehead, and her hazel eyes drew me gently in. “I wanted to see you,” she said.
“You could’ve gone in.”
“I couldn’t find the key. But I haven’t been here long.”
I dumped the bag and ran my hand over the splintery top of the door frame. The key wasn’t there.
“That idiot.”
“Who?”
“John. He’s the only other one who knew the key was there - he must’ve taken it to work.” I looked around for something to break the window, but the porch was empty. I pulled a bandanna out of my back pocket and wound it around my knuckles.
“Roger. You be careful.” Angie smiled again, and this time my heart burst and scattered like milkweed gone to seed.
I rapped lightly on the glass, testing the pane nearest the latch. It cracked diagonally on the first impact, northeast to southwest, and I hit it again. A jagged triangle, about half the window, fell inside and shattered on the kitchen floor. I spoke over my shoulder as I unwrapped the bandanna.
“Angie, will you tie up the dog again? I want to clean up the glass before I let him in the house.” She hooked a finger through the ring on Walker’s collar and led him back down the stairs. I was watching her walk away from me as I reached in to unlock the door.
Before I realized I had sliced my thumb on the edge of the window, I had the latch undone. The door swung wide and the knob gouged a deep dent in the plaster wall. For a moment, I stood there, seeing the dark blood drip onto the floor and coalesce with the powdered fragments of glass.
At the edges of the cut, the layers of tissue were clearly marked: white skin, thin yellow fat, pink muscle. The skin’s lost tension pulled it agape, to show off, deep, the gleam of the bone. My skull went suddenly empty and dry, and I sat down, clattering, in one of the chairs.
When Angie crossed the threshold and saw me holding the bandanna against my thumb, her eyebrows went up, but she didn’t cluck or squeal, and I was grateful for that. She swept the larger fragments of the window together and dumped them into an empty shoe box, then wiped up the almost invisible slivers with a wet hank of paper towels. She brought the dog upstairs, then knelt by my chair and brushed her lips across my ear as lightly as a moth.
“Can I see it?” She peeled the stiff cloth gingerly away and shuddered when the gash appeared, though it was barely seeping now. “You’re definitely going to need stitches.” Her hand drew the heat from my forehead. “You’re a little feverish, too.”
“There’s some tape and gauze in the bathroom. I do things like this a lot,” I said.
She didn’t smile. “Roger, I think we should go to the emergency room.”
“Would you get me the bandages, please?”
She carried the first aid kit in and banged it on the table next to me. Then she stood at the kitchen window, staring out at the ailanthus tree in the backyard, as if to dissociate herself from my foolishness. I wrapped the gauze as tightly as I could with one hand, until the pulse in my thumb throbbed, and I secured it with a piece of tape. She turned back and frowned at me.
“It’ll be fine. How about a beer?” I wasn’t faint any more, but sun and lack of sleep were gaining on me. When I yawned, my ears roared like far-off thunder.
“Okay,” she said. We drank Narragansett from long necked brown bottles, and I scrambled some eggs for supper. For dessert, we had coffee and blueberry pie, and sat on the couch kissing for a long sweet time. The light began to change, and I led her into the bedroom and pointed out the window.
“Look.”
Sunset stained a few wisps of cirrus with the purple-yellow of a fading bruise and seeped through the brush across the river. I opened the window and dry cool air flooded in.
“High pressure system coming through.” My throat ached delicately. Angie watched me work my shirt off over the lumpy bandage, then snuggled herself inside my arms for a moment.
I sat on the edge of the mattress to watch her undress, and it was her turn to be shy. Her body was less angular, softer than I remembered, as healing now as it was arousing. We loved more easily, too, without the self-consciousness, and when we had finished, the sun was entirely gone.
I lowered the blind and switched on a lamp. Her breath caught suddenly in her throat, and she slid out of bed in a minor storm of legs and sheets. The pillow case was marred with a spreading blot of blood, and I saw that the gauze around my thumb was soaked and dripping red.
“I’m calling my friend Trudy right now; she used to be a nurse. Will you go to the emergency room if she says you should?” I nodded, but she was already out in the hallway dialing.
Walker padded in from the living room and thumped down next to the bed. As Angie’s voice dropped and swelled on the phone, I switched off the lamp and sat on the floor, with my back against the cool plaster wall, holding the thumb out in front of me. The long curve of her spine gleamed whitely in the dark like a beacon, and my sureness that I’d live alone completely vanished into vapor.