Читать книгу Follow the Sun - Edward J. Delaney - Страница 11

4.

QUINN STANDS AT HIS BATHROOM SINK AND COUGHS, a deep liquid hacking that barely dislodges the muck and makes the heart leap as if from starting blocks. It’s early afternoon now; his lungs feel full of water. He tests the leaden resistance of the legs, the burn in back and the shoulders; his seaward timetable is usually set by their sluggish recovery, and only secondarily by the weather. He isn’t hung over; beer does nothing at all to him anymore. Not after all the harder stuff, the heroin and coke and speed that he calibrated as if a technician, dialing in his ups and downs. Those were the days of deciding, pharmacologically, when to work sixty-six straight hours, then when to sleep like a dead man. When to punch the needle through the skin and let the happiness roll in like a fog, misting the landscape of his troubles. The heroin had seemed like love when he had first come to it. When he tried to get out it was yet another bad match, something to shut up, to put at bay.

He has no food, no coffee or milk or orange juice, so he drinks from the kitchen faucet with the cup of his hand. He’ll dress and go to find food, soon. But the envelope, as yet unsealed, lies on the counter, with the familiar handwriting, Quinn in that loopy, overdone hand that already speaks to him like indictment.

It’s not a letter as much as a balance sheet.

Quinn—

Balance on missed child support is 4,000

Interest is now about 7,000

That’s $11,000.

WTF?

—G

Interest! Gina’s usurious rates, set independent of any jurisdiction. She hasn’t gone to court on it, and she clearly thinks he should be thankful. But after standing at the docks last night receiving his payout, he knew that he was screwed, after the catch-up mechanical work on the boat, paying the inept crew, and buying fuel and supplies. He will pay the money out for his daughter, all of it. He just doesn’t know when.

He knows he won’t sleep more and if he can’t sleep he may has well get back out there, if he can rope a crew. That’s the hardest part, finding guys too young or too down on their fortunes to pass on the obvious misery this living tends to be. The absence of the drugs not only means he can’t mask the fatigue, neither can he mask the reality. It’s been two years like this.

He came off heroin in the most inadvisable way, his way. He was trying to be a man about it. He simply got on his boat absent the required substance, and pushed headlong out toward the horizon. Heroin had become not just the way to come home; he had for some time brought his kit out to sea, unable to concentrate without the fix. He was burning through his profits and the needle tracks were becoming obvious on his arms. So, one day, he simply fled his abuses, putting himself in the middle of two powerful-but-opposing negatives: to not go forward without his fix, and then to not succumb and turn the boat around without a hold full of bugs. But he had still loaded up the coke, on the premise of one battle at a time.

He started puking two hours out, to the consternation of his two-man crew. They were new, and understandably worried about sailing with an apparently seasick skipper. The cramps bent him over, and the shits kept him running below. Out fifty miles, the bad waters came up with the winds and he felt he could barely stand. But the work went on and on.

He tried to think only of finding some peace. That was the new preoccupation for him, as he pushed forty. He’d been in hand-to-hand combat with Peace since he was a kid. Now he was ready to taste it, to take it on as a new substance of choice, to be consumed and ridden. He’d pretty well screwed up almost everything, starting at fifteen. His last year of high school he was “the kid who had a kid,” as his father dolefully lectured him nightly about the responsibilities he had, up to now, continued to mostly evade.

Peace, he thought as he leaned over the rail, ready to puke up those last strings of bile he’d not already heaved. He clung to the side as the boat steered itself, East-Southeast into the darkening sky, toward the Great South Channel.

The older of the new guys, João, started in on it.

“I hope you’re ready to work as hard as we are,” he said. “I need the money. I don’t need a skipper who can’t pull his load.”

“I’ll pull my load,” Quinn had barked over the grind of the diesel.

“I got kids to feed,” he said. “If you can’t do the work, give me and the boy equal bigger shares.”

“Is that what this is, then?” Quinn said, more sharply. “Negotiating shares a half-day out of port? Because you don’t do that.”

“You look like shit.”

“I’m just getting prepped,” Quinn said.

“I didn’t know I was signing on to a jackpot,” João said.

“You’ll do just fine,” Quinn said over his shoulder.

Quinn had done his farewell mainline the night before the trip. He was sleeping on the boat in those days; the spent needle went off the back as they cast off, held since morning for this bit of concealed ceremony, something approximating baptismal waters. And he had been ebullient the first few hours, both riding the dregs of the last of the smack, yet too easily allowing himself the sense of celebration of being off it. The new guy had been all smiles, sensing fun. Quinn asked, “Why did you want to work on lobster boats?”

“Beats sitting at home listening to the bitch run her mouth,” the new guy said, grinning.

As Quinn came down, it all came down. After he’d wrung himself out for hours with the vomiting, they began to bait and set the pots. He was instantly without strength. It was now twelve hours since the last rush, and the cravings came in on schedule, as precise as a train into a station. Quinn was overcome with the need. João and the kid were going hard, and Quinn’s own legs were cramping in a way he’d never known. He was suffering, but João was unrelenting.

“I’m not doing all the work,” he shouted, and bitterly. “I’m starting to think maybe I was had.”

The work, once out there, was always rote, mindless and mechanical. At the open stern the traps slid off one by one, roped into a long train. The job was like working on the edge of a tall building with no rail. Skill meant marking the edges nearly subconsciously, the industrious dance made leaden by withdrawal. He snuck to the cabin and snorted some more cocaine, filling the ache with the wrong medicine.

By late afternoon, this wasn’t turning out to be a good run. Better than half the pots were coming up empty, and a lot of throw-backs, and the cold rain in sheets. Quinn was in full agony, knowing that turning now, toward land and a fix and insolvency, was pure futility. He had the kid “notching the eggers”— the law said that any fertile female, egg-laden on the underside, be knife-cut with a V to denote its status, before being thrown back. The kid was only getting the hang of it, slowing it all.

“Waste of my damned time,” João was saying from the stern.

“I didn’t guarantee the bugs would jump right into the traps,” Quinn said, “and you ought to know it.”

Soon enough, the younger one had faded completely. Stamina was earned over time. Sixteen hours in and he began to wobble, not used to the sleepless stretches the work demanded.

“Go under and crash for an hour,” Quinn said. “I’ll come and get you.”

In the middle of the night, the big lights made the deck like a tiny arena of their failing. Quinn and João kept on with the work, no longer speaking, backs to one another. Somewhere in there, Quinn began to rally, letting the work try to be the cure, letting it be the anesthetic. He kept on, pulling and sorting, getting from one moment to another. Then he turned and saw that João was gone.

He didn’t have any idea of how long it had been. He stood, looking. Past the open stern was only the wake fading into the darkness behind the trundling boat. No one was there. He went below and found the kid sleeping hard, and shook him. The kid startled, scanning as if he had no idea.

“Where’s the other guy?” Quinn said.

“Who?”

He went back up top and looked fore and aft. The guy was just gone, and the boat was only so big. Quinn looked at his watch. It was past four in the morning, with the first hint of light at the horizon. Out beyond the boat, the waters rolled dark and relentless.

He got on the radio in the wheelhouse, and quickly had the Coast Guard. He already knew it was going to be a search for a body, and likely a useless one. They weren’t wearing life jackets, as they hindered the work. Off the radio, he unfolded the paperwork on the chart table, and looked at the handwriting. Botelho was the guy’s last name. He hadn’t remembered that. The Coast Guard radio man said there was a boat not far away, and coming at him full throttle.

Under the bunk were the bags of cocaine. His bank; his assurance of unbroken chemical relief. He was frantic with what to do with it. The prospects of a double withdrawal were just too daunting. He was expecting the Coast Guard ship to be coming up on him imminently, somewhere in the rising dawn. Quinn opened the first bag, went in with his finger, and snorted hard. He was thinking at that moment to just hide them away. There would be no pretense for a vessel search. He immediately knew he was fooling himself, of course. But he needed the powder that badly.

He tends to find himself back out there a lot, the engines cut and the wind gusting and the rains coming down. The young guy, afraid to let go of the rail and crying to go home. It was only when that white Coast Guard ship was in sight with the gray light of a shrouded rising sun that he panicked fully. Abruptly, he went underneath, pulled out the bags, and began to dump them on the lee side, hoping no one was on him with their binoculars. Which, of course, they were.

And, as always, he brings his head up now, surprised to find himself not back on that boat’s deck but in the ongoing present.

When Botelho disappeared from the deck of Quinn’s boat, it had changed Quinn’s life in ways that were probably for the better, but felt much worse. Prison time allowed him to fight through withdrawal, a state-funded version of a rehab getaway. Had he instead come back from that run with an intact crew and a hold full of bugs, he’d have surely succumbed to the needle by nightfall: maybe, finally, too much. There was always going to be that time.

In the county jail in those next days, they could have begun to wean him with methadone and let him sweat through the days in an infirmary bed, had he ever asked. But he told no one. He still stubbornly held that this was a personal battle. By the time he went to court with his plea bargain signed, he had the strange thought he might live to forty after all.

“Guilty,” he’d said, almost stepping on the judge’s words in the rush to get it out.

Federal prison bit wasn’t so bad, either; he was surrounded pretty much by guys like he worked with every day in the lobster business. He went to a medium-security facility in upstate New York. Ray Brook. It was mainly just uneventful for him. The first few nights, at “orientation,” he’d been in a cell three down from a guy coming off something; the guy kept screaming into the night that he needed his fix. Then, one night, the noise stopped. At chow, someone said, “He hanged himself.” Someone else said, “Bullshit, he got taken to rehab.” Either way, things got quiet then. There were occasional fights, but nobody came near him. The work had made him too big to mess with. He didn’t make conversation, didn’t take exceptions, felt no need to pose or preen, and quietly counted down the weeks. Some guys, they were still trying to prove something, or maybe disprove something. Quinn took it only as a quiet recusal from many things.

He goes back to that at moments like this, lying sober on his small bed in the middle of the night. Quinn has awakened again after sleeping through the day and then the evening; it’s closing time for the bars as he awakens from his stretch, and he has nothing to do. Below his window he can hear the hoots of the drunks coming out to the street; he misses none of it. Instead he lies here and fights the urge to think about things he’d rather not. The way he did in that silent interlude of prison, although that interlude is what invades his thoughts.

His public defender told him that if he pleaded guilty to straight possession they’d drop the distribution charge.

“But I wasn’t distributing,” Quinn said. In conference, the defender wondered aloud if, given the amount of powder found, and the amount estimated to have been dumped, if he had the constitution of a plow horse. Yes, Quinn apparently did. The defender waited until he was sure that wasn’t an effort at humor, then began talking about a one-year probation and mandatory drug counseling. The defender didn’t know he was coming off heroin. The anxiety and down moods that came with it, and Quinn’s struggles to keep it together while voluntarily off smack and forcibly off coke, led to certain conclusions in town. Mainly, that he had killed Botelho. He was, to most, visibly stewing in his own guilt. The theory was relentlessly peddled by Botelho’s woman. The key piece of evidence seemed to be, at the moment Botelho evaporated, the convenient absence of the kid who had crewed with them. The new guy had truthfully noted that Quinn and Botelho had been at odds before the man disappeared. About pay.

Fact was, Quinn still had no idea what had happened. The traps were all in the water, so he wasn’t pulled over by an outgoing line; the sea was moderate that night, so he wasn’t taken by a rogue wave. How he could have gone over was something Quinn rolled over in his head, constantly. He must have just slipped, which no one was ever going to believe. He must have had an absent moment, when he took that one step where nothing firm rose up to meet his boot.

The search for the body, working on a too-generous 900-square-mile grid, had been the usual pointless exercise. Botelho was not a dolphin, and the currents didn’t move that fast, and his life vest was still on the nail in the wheelhouse. Quinn sat in his small cell before bail, and waited for someone to tell him what was going on, which no one did. In those first days back on land, he stalked the small space as an animal would, and slept without realizing it. He’d lie on the bunk staring at the ceiling, and in a blink he was in a dark room. The mere notion of any drug-running was a joke. You didn’t buy product on land and take it that far out to sea. But that much presumed powder (the primary evidence was the size of the bags from which it had been dumped) and a vanished man (and the imprecise claims he must have just fallen off the backside) meant something had to be made to stick.

Quinn understood that. He wanted it done fast. They’d already seized his crumbling boat as part of the initial distribution charge; he was ready to let it go, and try for a new boat and new escape, back Out There. On a Monday morning, he was driven by Robbie to the federal courthouse in Providence. There seemed now a distance from the matter of Botelho’s disappearance, for which no evidence existed. He went into federal court and blurted his guilty plea on possession. The judge, a middle-aged woman, looked at him narrowly over the tops of her reading glasses. His clothes were soaked through with flop sweat, and he was long unshaven. She seemed to come to certain conclusions. Thirty-six months in federal prison, twelve months to serve, is what had turned out to be on her mind.

“Jesus,” Robbie said aloud from the back of the courtroom. They remanded Quinn right then, another surprise. As the handcuffs and shackles went on him, he said to Robbie, “Winters are slow anyway. Three years means a year, and twelve months means six. I’ll be ready to work by next spring.” It didn’t even bother Quinn that much. It was no better or worse than anything else, he thought.