Open Water

My thanks to Tony Jackett, captain of the
Josephine G.
, and to M. G. Moore, captain of the
Blue Moon
, for their technical advice; to Kim Witherspoon, for her wisdom and support; to Daniel Frank, my editor, who has helped me from page one, and whose particular vision schools and entices my own; to John Skoyles for every faith and freedom.

H
e came home to Newport with a fractured wrist. He returned to his stepmother’s seaside house and took the same upstairs room with the narrow bed and noisy mattress baffles he had slept in for years. His stepmother had saved him from Social Services when he was orphaned at thirteen and he owed her the visit. He denied it was his final courtesy. Yet, her cancer had advanced. He knew she was sick. Willis had come home to nurse her, but because of his fracture, she assumed it was the other way around.

Willis had received a general discharge from the Navy after a short assignment at the Naval Supply Center in Norfolk. He never shipped out. He worked on a terminal in the bowels of a warehouse, cataloguing dry goods and food supplies for the carriers. He started to do some wagering and some simple pilfering. It wasn’t much, just what he could get into his partner’s Plymouth once or twice during weekend liberty. Mostly it was cases of cigarettes, which he sold to Richmond Vending.

He reclined in his childhood bed. Even small movements jostled his wrist; its torn nerves were chattering beneath the heavy plaster cast. He tried to manage his pain but it was a strange, invisible geography. Its terrain shifted.
Pain migrated from its formal nucleus and wormed in all directions, into icy spinal ravines and flash fires of its thermal dimension. His pulse mimicked the trouble spot in the jelly of his retina.

Rennie came into the room. Her long white hair was loose and she had tied the satin strings of her bed jacket in a lopsided bow. She switched on the lamp so that Willis could see what she offered. A pellet in a silver wrapper. A morphine sulfite suppository. Willis sat up and took the foil almond from her hand. He peeled open the foil and pinched the smooth insert; its glycerol coating responded to the heat of his fingertips. He placed the suppository on the night table.

Willis said, “How long have you known me?”

“Forever,” she said.

“I’m serious,” he said. “I’m asking, how many years have I lived here with you?”

She sat down next to him. He was making a speech.

Willis said, “In all those years, have you ever known me to put anything in my ass?”

“This is a legitimate, broad-spectrum painkiller.”

He was holding the crook of his elbow where the edge of his plaster cast ate into his biceps. “Where did you get these things?” he said, matching his thumb against the waxy insert.

“It’s a prescription. With refills. I’ve got a whole inventory left over from surgery. You know, we’re letting nature take its course. They hand out the whole candy store when it’s terminal.”

“Maybe you’ll need these for yourself.”

“I can share.”

“Yeah, well. Don’t be offended if I decline,” he said.

“You’re just acting embarrassed. Pain isn’t so shy, is it?” she told him.

He agreed with that.

Rennie said, “Willis, let me remind you, this is not an oral medication.”

She switched out his lamp. He followed his stepmother’s no-nonsense silhouette around the room as she adjusted the Venetians, slivering the moonlight.

Rennie had arranged her big Fresnel lens on his windowsill. A long hull of beryl-green glass, clear as mint tea. The scrap was from the original lighthouse at Bullock’s Point and Rennie thought the broken shard held luck. The lens was usually displayed against the living room fanlight window, where it refracted normal sunshine and circulated green medallions across the carpet and chairs. She placed it in Willis’s room for his recovery. Even weak moonlight filtered through the lens, shooting tines across the wall. Then she left him alone.

He rested for several moments. In the dark, his arm seemed to quadruple in size. The new plaster cast had hardened into an aching zone, imprisoning pain’s trigger points. The delicate flesh on the inside of his wrist was prickling with fishhook sutures where he couldn’t scratch. The fact that there was an available method to relieve his pain made his pain worse.

He waited. A wolf spider edged across the maple headboard and darted inside his plaster cuff, a recurring apparition. He knocked his cast against the bedpost to chase it out. He pushed down his briefs and inserted the medication, sinking the morphine pellet through the taut, resistant sphincter. Within minutes, he felt his hips liquefy, his spine warmed and ascended in fluid notches until the drug reached his gnawing wrist and Willis slept.

For the first week, pain vanished, returned, vanished again with every application. He peeled the foil from another crayon bullet and tamped it into his rectum. It freed
Willis from his wall of thoughts. When the drug had less effect, he doubled the dosage. There were side effects. After two weeks, his pelvis felt hollow as a coal chute and he had lost his center of gravity. He tried to wean himself from the morphine. The pain returned. Without the rectal suppositories, Willis never slept. He got out of bed in the middle of the night and searched for Rennie’s vial of Seconal in the mirrored cabinet above the sink. Glossy capsules spilled across the porcelain like little slivers of pimento.

The rainy March weather revived the fleas; the humidity moistened egg casings and the insects emerged, dotting the curtain hems. Rennie had to call exterminators in. The men powdered the floors, but the fleas held on. Every night Rennie came into Willis’s room to count his bites. She wanted to know if they were the same welts or new ones. She examined his legs and circled each individual swelling with a ballpoint pen. She rolled the tip of the pen over the back of his knee, tugging the skin. The tiny indented circle made a pleasing sensation until she lifted the pen and started again somewhere else. She moved up his legs, marking his buttocks and the small of his back. He turned over and she inked the sharp knob of his collarbone and spotted the ladder of his ribs where the insect bites flared. He listened to her count them out, drawing nineteen dime-size rings the first night, twenty-four the next. In a week’s time, the painful histamine domes were subsiding. To make sure, Rennie took a pair of Willis’s white crew socks from his drawer and pulled them up high on her ankles. She walked room to room in Willis’s socks. She returned to his bedside and stood back, in the center of the oak floor. She told Willis, “See anything?” She showed him one foot and then
the other. Willis tried to look for the vermin but it didn’t show up. He couldn’t keep his eyes focused on her tiny figure any longer. The morphine had lifted into his line of vision like a furry blindfold, a cashmere turtleneck tugged up to his hairline.