Читать книгу Follow the Sun - Edward J. Delaney - Страница 15

8.

OF COURSE THE PREMISE OF INCARCERATION IS TO wrench away all things one holds dear; Quinn was given to ponder what that might have actually been, as Freddy Santoro will soon do. On that night of his arrest, Quinn was brought off the Coast Guard cutter Monomo, and handed over to Federal agents at Woods Hole. He had conceded the Christine to impoundment, and presumed he had a better-than-even shot at prison. When by dawn they bunked him down in that solitary cell at the Wyatt Detention Center, awaiting federal charges, he presumed it. By the time the lights went out, he’d largely resolved he clearly needed to be punished for Botelho’s disappearance. He’d been in the throes—shaking, hallucinating, witnessing the starburst against his own retinas. He should have been more watchful; that was the unspoken agreement you made on a boat, even with your worst enemy. He’d let his own shit cost him the few seconds of awareness when it would have mattered. Prison, for that moment, was the best place he could hide.

But what he had lost was a murkier proposition. His boat, on its last shreds of usefulness? He’d nearly expected it to crumble beneath him. It was more caulk than timber. His good name, which he’d begun to destroy so young? Not likely. His ability to move freely in the world? His work had taken that away, mostly.

His marriage was long over, and that had been both merciful and too late coming. He’d let it ride out, on habit and denial, and now he’d come to regret that.

The only thing he really lost was his high. His coke and heroin and alcohol, all the things that had made all those other things remotely tolerable. That first night on that thin prison mattress, he rode the sleeplessness and anxiety, breathing slowly, stretching, and getting on the floor to punch out some pushups. It was like going into training against a physical opponent. He’d always approached the world like an athlete, and now he fell back into the reassuring routines. He did sit-ups until he was exhausted and then lay on the concrete floor breathing. One of the night guards came by and said, “Are you all right?”

“Can’t sleep.”

“Don’t you have your arraignment in the morning?”

He did. Hours later he came into the courtroom and there was Robbie, to his regret. Quinn didn’t know why he didn’t want to see his brother, he just didn’t.

He was being bailed out without having asked. He would have just as soon stayed put behind those bars. His spell of freedom until he pleaded guilty and reported to federal prison was the worst punishment, aware from minute to minute of his screaming urge for a needle. The prospect of this journey alone, only facing strangers, had its merit. By the afternoon, back in his room in a full withdrawal sweat, having met an affectless lawyer who would defend him, he was clear on the true indictment. He realized that out on the water, far offshore, they were still looking for Botelho, the costly effort to be humane, no matter how logically pointless.

The man was dead minutes after he went off the stern. Quinn sweated into his mattress, and shook in near-convulsions, and wished himself locked in a cell instead. He wondered if he could revoke his own bail. And for the first time in a long time, he wondered how he’d come to all this.

In his recovery from heroin, Quinn had been left with an unsettling rime, an infection of a self-awareness he had never thought could be harbored by his DNA. Regret. Shame. In his clear-mindedness, his memory had become sharp, and serrated, and unbidden. He went back to moments that probably only he remembered, things that at age eighteen or twenty-five or thirty were just fleeting moments but had somehow gone dormant in himself, to flare up constantly and unforgivingly. He remembered one night in his early adulthood going behind a bar he’d just been ejected from, and with his buddies looking on he’d shoved his fingers down his throat and vomited all over the hood of the bartender’s car. His friends were howling, and in the moment he’d felt heroic. He was giving them a damned performance. He had a wife and baby at home and he didn’t much care. Now, when memories like that intrude, he only feels the dull ache of having been a fool, so foolish he didn’t even see how obvious it was. That is the person he showed the world, at least his small world, and now he avoids the world altogether. The 4 a.m. walks to the docks are at least enshrouded in silence, and he can move through this town unseen, and in many ways, he hopes, forgotten.

That life had begun on the boats he’d joined after Chuck Joyce’s. Quinn was learning then that some lobstermen he knew were straight arrows, but most not so much, in varying degrees. Some deck bosses he knew went home after every run to good wives and clean children, made their house payments and maintained their pickup trucks. He saw, in time, that most of these were inshore men. The ones he knew who went out to the Banks, the ones who took too-small boats to too-distant waters, were the ones who were pulled to the risk, and the risk wasn’t limited to putting traps in the water.

It was a time when coke was everywhere. It was coming in cheap and plentiful, and some of the guys he knew were doubling as sellers. Everything was a joke to Quinn in those days. He didn’t know how to treat anything otherwise. He met the world with that still-white smile, and aqueous blue eyes. It was kid stuff, a goof. They had figured out how to beat the disapproving world of adults.

Cocaine, he found, had many levels of magic. It wasn’t just the high itself; it was the entrée it offered. The powder was getting them into parties to which they’d otherwise not have ever been invited; there was a girls’ college a couple of towns over where Quinn and his buddies would allow themselves to believe it was they whom the girls were interested in, and not the goods. They’d stand in the corner at parties, beer in their hands, watching the good-looking ones dance, after they’d snorted in a back bedroom. None of the girls seemed overly interested in them, and the others guys—the college boys from the university and the boyfriends shipped in from hometowns—knew why they were actually there, and seemed unduly scared. He was eighteen and Gina was living at the family home with the baby; after being ejected from the family home, Quinn was sleeping on the floor of an apartment three older guys shared as they alternately went out on the runs. Nobody was ever present at the same time, it seemed, so he moved onto the couch and began kicking in some money. He was making the payments to Gina’s parents. When one of the guys asked him if he’d run some bags up to some buyers at a college in Boston, and that he’d get some “commission grams” for it, there seemed no reason to say no.

He bought a bus ticket to Boston, with tight-packed bags of the blow under his coat. And when he walked the halls of the dormitory, at Northeastern, he felt wholly on another planet. He felt like a man among children. Boys lay on their dorm bunks listening to records and drinking weak beer. They seemed as children seem, untouched by true experience. When he knocked on the appointed door, the boy who opened it pulled him in and fanned cash across his small desk. In all, it was simply transactional.

He bought a cheap car, three hundred for a ’79 Buick Regal with busted suspension. Now he could alternate work on the boats, but with city drop-offs here and there as a favor, and that favor got him work on the boats, where the money was; he and his buddies were also throwing that cash around much too easily. Kids their ages were pulling minimum wage at McDonald’s while he was hauling in man money. They were closing every bar they went to, and raging through the night until they met their boats, hours before dawn, to load bait. When he began using a chunk of his coke to simply keep going, he’d made that crucial turn.

The life plan had always seemed foregone. He was going to marry Gina, although nobody had ever asked him how he felt about that. She was going to finish high school while her mother minded the baby and Quinn put some money away. One afternoon the old man came down to the docks with Robbie—who was back from his first semester at Stonehill College—looking to patch some of the damage between them.

“You should get another job,” his father said. “This isn’t going to be good work for a married man.”

“What other job?” Quinn said.

“There are lots of jobs,” the old man said. “This one was just to toughen you up.”

But he was already too far gone. Land looked different when it was only a thread of horizon, and in the work he could expunge from his mind for those hours all these things that clawed at him. The more coke he did, the more that time became something that purged from him all the frustrations that had come at him too early.

Robbie, the older brother, stood there, abashed.

“So did you make the hockey team up there?”

“No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I’m not fast enough.”

“Oh, come on.”

“What do you care? It’s my problem, not yours.”

“Cut it out, you two,” the old man croaked.

They all went quiet again. The old man looked like he was waiting for some kind of an answer.

“What is it, then?” Quinn said.

“You need to find a real job and then marry that girl.”

Quinn thought about that. He didn’t want to do either of those things, in truth. But there was the baby, his daughter he’d hardly seen.

“Look, I’ll marry her,” he finally said. “But I’m not getting some other job.”

That was it. There was something inescapable about the daily grip of his work. To cast the baited pots into deep water and pull them back to discover within them the salt-slick prize, the glistening bugs snapping angry in their entrapment. To pull from the sea the hard currency of true sustenance, the same miracle that made him feel distant fraternity to some Midwestern farmer pulling growing things from sour dirt. It was a marvel, and it made you wonder about the fraud of any other work people could do. It was almost enough to make you forget you were losing money each time you touched that simple miracle.

Robbie’s visitation days with his daughter, Sarah, come cross-hatched with both thrill and dread. He’s never felt like a very good father, with his twice-monthly contact. But that’s what the ex, M., had demanded in divorce court. She sat with her new boyfriend, who she had lined up for his job. Robbie, in turn, had just wanted it to be over, but now regrets his willingness to fold so easily. Sarah was little more than a baby then; the assumption was that as she got older, they’d spend more time together. That has yet to happen. His own work schedule thwarts such change. When Sarah comes weekends with her backpack, dropped off in the mall-parking-lot switchover by her mother with no words exchanged, he feels as if he has to introduce himself all over again. She comes at him, always, with a smile that makes him bereft at all he has missed. The mystery of why things fail so badly arrive with her. But, at least, Sarah gets in the car each time as if this is a familiar corner of her large universe.

In the car, seat belt fastened, she says, “What’s for dinner?”

“Mac and cheese,” he says, to her predictable delight. Having dinners her mother does not abide is one of the small pleasures he can afford her. Their relationship involves mostly eating at franchise restaurants and watching the DVDs Sarah brings in her backpack. She is entranced by endless loops of princesses and fairies and 3D animals. The fatherly indulgences he sponsors are both bribery and distance, as he has no other ideas what to do with her. He remembers as a child that his sister was largely his mother’s ward, he and Quinn their father’s. It seemed a natural order of things. So he spends his weekends with Sarah mostly trying to figure out how to kill the time, a series of long jumps from breakfast to lunch, lunch to dinner, dinner to bedtime.

“Do you ever think about playing a sport?” he says, hopefully.

“Not really.”

“You want to play catch?”

“I don’t really like that.”

“Want to go the park and kick a ball around?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Which leaves him out of ideas.

He doesn’t cover games on the weekends that she comes over, and so it would probably seem odd to take her to one. He brought her to the Red Sox one Saturday afternoon last summer, but she folded under the noise of the crowd, and they left the ballpark with her sobbing on his shoulder.

“I wish Coco was here,” she says.

“Is that one of your toys?”

“No, Daddy, she’s my friend.”

“You have a friend named Coco?” he says, to which her face goes sour.

“She’s a toy, but she’s my friend.”

One of the provisions of the divorce was that Sarah was not allowed to be around Quinn. He was in his worst addiction at the time, and it was another fight Robbie didn’t choose to make. He never mentions Quinn, and Sarah seems to have no memory of him. There’s less and less about the family that she knows. Dad is gone and Ma is down at the nursing home, her mind seeming erased of all but the very oldest memories. His sister, Margaret, moved to North Carolina years ago; between she and Robbie and Social Security and Medicaid they manage the payments for their mother. They were as tight a family as any, he thought, but now it’s been reduced to him, and Quinn, and the duty Robbie feels toward him. And he’s only slowly admitting to himself he’s become so weary of Quinn. He carries enough weight, as he sees it, without his brother entering the room. When Quinn messed up, Robbie knew Quinn would pay for his sins. What he didn’t realize was how much Quinn’s sins would exact a toll on Robbie himself.

He looks up and his daughter is staring at him.

“I want to watch my DVD,” Sarah says. He furtively wishes the marriage had lasted long enough for a second child, so at least they could occupy each other. A DVD makes a poor sibling.

By the time the DVD is ten minutes in, Sarah’s already fallen asleep in front of the television. He hopes this is the most awkward phase to bridge, a man and his second-grade daughter. He’s hanging on, as always, hoping things will get better.

He sits for a bit, then goes into the bedroom. The business card Jean had given him is on the dresser, where he’d laid it out that night when he’d come home.