Читать книгу Follow the Sun - Edward J. Delaney - Страница 8

1.

THE BUGS INVADE QUINN BOYLE’S MIND IN THE NIGHT, strangely, now that he’s finally clean. Or maybe because he is. It’s been almost three years from the spider’s bite of that last needle, nearly two years off the prison bit, and a dozen months since he finally felt he had mastered it. But the bugs are a nightly reality, crawling up into his head.

When he worked on that first boat, he’d laughed when they called the lobsters that. The bugs. He laughed hard at nearly anything back then, seventeen years old and looking at all the world as a joke. He laughed hard before the fatigue of life wiped it from his face.

Bugs. In that diminution, he came to see, lay the illusion of control, a presumption of rendering them manageable. Always, they came out of the ocean fighting, tail-fisted in the back of the bedrooms of the stainless-wire pots, slashing into light and air they’d never known. Pulled free and sorted by the thick-gloved human hand, that unfamiliar rival. Rubber-banded into submission, and then dropped into the churning hold tank. The broken and undersized got probation, flipped back over the side like an afterthought. The strong ones were the doomed.

Down in that bristling hold, the lobsters could shimmer like dark coins. When you were still out there, on open water, they never stopped being the enemy, cutting through gloves, pinching, snapping, and making you earn every victory.

Back home was when they truly got in your head. Back at the dock, someone had to ease down into the tank and begin pulling them out. In that darkness, you began the filling of the plastic crates the seafood wholesalers brought out. Someone had to descend into that foaming fray. Down into a purgatory of a thousand claws reaching brainlessly to seize what they could: they strained at your boots, your orange waterproofs, the hang of your slicker. Some, always, worked off their bands, wrenching free again to inflict their surprises. The big claws could catch you as hard as a human bite. The bugs were all instinct and no proper thought, and he’s been down there a thousand times without ever being used to it. When he was able to convince some green kid to come out and work with him (as he was conscripted as a teenaged dropout with a pregnant girlfriend), he risked losing that guy by sending him down too quickly.

But: better to lose them on shore, of their own volition. He’s seen two men lost from boats at sea in his twenty-five years of work. The first one was on someone else’s boat, and Quinn was just glad it wasn’t him. The second was off Quinn’s own stern. The wife of that man is still calling Quinn a murderer, and loudly, especially when she’s had enough drinks. Twice, Quinn himself has gone into the far ocean, mouth filling with brine and boots leaden with water, and somehow he has lived. But the ingrained fright of being down in the bughouse is what comes to his head when he cries out from his bed, on the stillness of dry land.

He’s running straight west, plotting behind the setting sun, that long funnel into familiar port. The hold churns with the new haul, and the work has been hard. The shoulders throb, the neck, the leathered hands. But on his charts, he knows where he is. The soles of his arthritic feet are more sensitive of depths than the sonar’s digital paint-palette of soundings. The two kids working for him are sleeping now in the cabin, exhausted, but he’d never tell them out loud where they are right now. He knows precisely those spots where each man was lost; as the boat churns on he intuits those lost souls, deep below, staring up at him with cold, white eyes from frigid depths. When he passes this haunting patch of water, fifty miles east northeast off Nantucket, he sometimes does feel like a murderer. Botelho, he thinks, duly notes this from his grave at thirteen unlucky fathoms.

Robbie Boyle, the older brother by a year, is waiting over a mug of draft beer. He’s cut out of work for a couple of hours to meet Quinn at Jack’s Bar. Leaving the office early to receive Quinn is widely understood, extending far enough to amount to community service: Quinn spent a lot of years making trouble, those first hours back ashore.

Down at the docks, the boat is in and the bugs are coming out. Quinn will come through the door, sustained by cash payment and dry-land coffee, both of which have allowed him to remain awake into his third day. Caffeine is a poor substitute for cocaine, but Quinn is also just off probation, finally. Robbie only sees him the nights he’s just back.

Robbie’s forty-three and he’s been at The Record twenty-one years. He’s spent that seeming eternity writing for the sports section that once wrote stories about him, and about Quinn, when they played all the sports: football, hockey, baseball. Both of them had been very good in that small-town way. There was a time Robbie dreamed of being in the press box at Fenway Park, or at the Boston Garden, covering the big leagues. But his skills were never polished enough, and his ambition never burned sufficiently hot. Tonight he must eventually leave this bar and venture out to cover a boys’ basketball game, and he’s feeling the vise of obligations.

Somebody whose name he can’t recall wanders past, asking him if he’s waiting for Quinn. He nods. When they meet, Robbie tends to watch Quinn closely, doing the talking even as Quinn rarely talks back in those first landed hours. It’s an oiling of his re-entry into the world. Robbie promised him this two years ago, up at the federal correctional. Maybe the time in prison saved Quinn’s life on two accounts, Robbie has observed. Quinn got clean, and then grudgingly into a safer vessel to replace the one seized by the Coast Guard. The newer boat, sadly, is just a shell of affectless fiberglass, nominally seaworthy. The engine needs an overhaul, and until such time threatens to quit two hundred miles out at sea. And Robbie prays Quinn hasn’t let the insurance payments get behind. The Hell of lapsed Catholicism doesn’t compare to that of lapsed coverage.

The door bangs open and there Quinn stands. He’s a big man now, bearded with flecks of gray, two hundred and fifty pounds or more, bulky in the neck and shoulders and heavy in the gut. He outweighs Robbie by sixty pounds, and is likely twice as strong. In his heroin days he’d been somewhat thinner, possessing the deceptive aura of apparent health. Quinn moves far more slowly coming in off the ocean. He slides up wordlessly onto his stool, nods to Peggy behind the bar, and takes his first seventy-five-cent draft.

“So how was the run?” Robbie says.

Quinn shrugs. “More bugs, money about the same. The prices have been dropping. The more we all bring in, the more the prices drop. I’m always chasing it.”

“At least you’re not losing money.”

“But I was hoping for better.”

Despite being the younger brother, Quinn’s face seems irredeemably aged. His cheeks and nose and neck are spidered with keratosis; fresh off the water, the smell of salt and sweat billow off him.

“When are you going back out again?”

“Jesus, Rob, I just got in.”

“I’m just asking.”

“Sunday, maybe, Monday. I need to give these kids I got working for me a chance to rest up, but also not too long to reconsider.”

“Are they any good?”

“As good as any I can get. So no, not very good.”

“So can’t you get somebody else?”

“Who?” Quinn said, tightening. “From where?”

“There must be somebody who needs the work.”

“It’s always harder to get guys . . .”

The “since” in that sentence is implied. “Since” Botelho went under. “Since” the arrest and the prison time that resulted. Quinn has been making a living depending on raw kids who too often quit after their first run, to be found at the bar later telling girls about their lobsterman days. And if they’re any good at all, and they decide to keep at it, they end up on another boat.

Quinn’s fatigue looks sea-deep, and his soul seems as callused as his roughened hands, which fold onto themselves thickly, broken and then healed in many places. He knocks back the first beer and raises his hand for another. There is no celebration here. He’s back in, from another of a thousand trips out to the edge of the depths.

Quinn takes his fresh beer, bolts it, and passes the emptied glass right back to Peg, the bartender. She pours a refill, and says, “You’ll need to slow down after a reasonable number.”

“Who is this girl?” Quinn says generally. “And what’s this supposedly reasonable number?”

“You know who I am,” she says. “And I know who you are.”

“Beer can’t even dent me, kid. It’s just a little help getting off to dreamland.”

Peg looks at Robbie, waiting.

“He’s fine, really,” Robbie says, although in all these years he’s never been completely sure.