Sons from Afar (33 page)

Sammy didn't correct him, and maybe that was why, anyway.

“They say that mothers have a special feeling for their sons. Do you think that's true?”

Sammy didn't remember that. But how would he know? Momma hadn't been normal anyway. It wasn't normal to just abandon your kids, even though you loved them, and then go die in a hospital for crazy people. It didn't make any difference to how Sammy felt whether it was normal or not, but it wasn't normal.

“Because my mom might have another baby if they can afford it,” Robin continued. “And it might be a girl.”

“Yes, it might,” Sammy agreed. He started to laugh at the obviousness of that. Robin joined in. They were thinking along the same lines, he and Robin. Sammy could feel that, and he liked it. Maybe Robin was going to be a friend. “My father never married her,” he said. And wished right away he'd kept his mouth shut.

But Robin surprised him. “Sometimes I wished my father hadn't. They just got divorced anyway, which is about the same as never being married. Only it's worse, maybe.”

“Maybe,” Sammy agreed, thinking about this new angle. “You can't lose what you never had. Anyway, you got another one.”

“He made her cry,” Robin said. He was looking out over the water now; it made him ashamed that his father made his mother cry. “She used to cry a lot and he'd never—care.”

Sammy didn't much like the sound of Robin's father, who didn't try to visit his own son, anyway, and he knew about his son, he knew where his son was. “Anyway, she doesn't cry now, does she?”

“If she did, Dad would care,” Robin told him. “Did yours ever?”

“I don't remember, so maybe she didn't. She used to sing some awfully sad songs, I remember that.” It was time to start the motor, but Sammy was reluctant to stop the talking. He knew he had to, they'd have lots of time for talking, all summer. And besides, all this remembering hurt him; it hurt him to love Momma and to wonder: if his father had been different, if she didn't need to go crazy and die, if there had been someone there taking care of her, instead of someone there needing to be taken care of. Sammy had never thought before how complicated it might have been.

He tried to explain to Robin about pulling up the traps, how you had to almost jerk up at first, to close the doors and trap the crab that might be inside. On the floor of the bay, he explained, the four doors lay flat open, and a long quick pull on the line from above closed them before the crab could escape. “We probably won't get any, this time of year. This summer we'll be crabbing with a trotline, but I didn't want to bait one just for an hour. This is a kind of practice.”

“I'll need practice, because I've never done anything like it,” Robin said. “Dad said so. He said I should plan to watch carefully and take directions.”

Sammy, smiling away inside of his head at Robin's little-kid seriousness, gave him directions as he brought the boat back to the first float and approached it at the lowest possible speed. Robin leaned out to grab the line just under the water. “Got it,” Robin said, straightening up and pulling his arm way back, then hauling the line in as fast as he could while Sammy turned the boat in a slow circle to keep the line clear of the propeller.

“Empty,” Robin said. He held the dripping trap out over the water. “But it felt heavy.”

“Just drop it in again,” Sammy directed, speaking loudly to be heard over the motor. “And—” He was about to say toss the float wide, but he saw that Robin remembered. He kept his mouth shut.

The other two traps were empty too. Sammy didn't mind. Robin didn't mind.

The clouds that were moving in a mass over them had turned darker. The lower layer now blew thick, white, like whitecaps upside down. Instead of letting the boat drift, Sammy set the anchor. He showed Robin how to do it, how to pull back on the anchor line to be sure the two broad steel teeth were lodged in the bay floor. The anchor caught, hard and fast, and he checked to be sure the line was well wrapped around the cleat at the bow. He explained to Robin that the waves were getting choppier and the sky didn't look too good.

“It's okay for us to be out still, isn't it?” Robin asked, trying not to sound frightened.

“Sure,” Sammy reassured him. “I've been out in lots worse.” He had, too.

The boat rocked now, its floor slapping down onto the sides of
waves that passed beneath them. The wind was chilly. Sammy didn't wait too long. It wasn't the time of year for squalls, he thought, but it wouldn't be too smart to get themselves soaked with rain. He started the motor after only a few minutes, then told Robin to sit at it, ready to shift into gear when he had the anchor loose.

The trouble was, the anchor wouldn't come up. It was stuck on something and Sammy couldn't pull it free. If it had been Jeff or James in the boat, he could have tried approaching the anchor from a different angle; but Robin wouldn't know how to work the tethered boat around, wouldn't know how to hold it against the wind and waves, wouldn't know how to try running the boat up over the line to pull the anchor loose, wouldn't know to cut the motor immediately so that the line wouldn't wrap around the propeller. If they changed places, Sammy thought, that wouldn't be any better because Robin wouldn't know how to play on the anchor line, feeling the right direction to pull in, if they could find it.

The waves weren't really getting that much higher, he told himself. The wind really wasn't rising so fast. He knew that. But he felt as if wind and waves were building, every second.

He jerked on the line, pulling with all his weight.

Nothing happened.

He jerked again. He leaned out over the water and tried pulling straight up.

He couldn't budge it. They were caught there, trapped.

Robin was watching him. He didn't know what to do and the kid was watching him, like Sammy had the answers to everything. He wondered how long it would be, anyway, until somebody figured out that something had happened, and found a boat to come looking for them. In this weather—which wasn't bad yet, not at all, but might get worse.

Sammy wasn't thinking clearly, he knew that. Ideas fell around in his mind, like a castle you'd built out of wooden blocks, then kicked down. Ideas fell with a thump all over his mind and he couldn't do any more than listen to them hitting the ground.

He reached down and uncleated the anchor line, tossing it overboard. He'd hear about that, but he couldn't think of anything else to do to free their boat. The anchor line sank under the waves.

As soon as he nodded to Robin, who shifted into forward with the motor racing at a speed that almost tumbled Sammy out of the boat, the wind seemed to slow down. The waves seemed to subside.

Maybe it wasn't so bad after all. But it had seemed bad, dangerous. He thought now that things were okay. But he honestly hadn't thought that before. It was an honest mistake. But what would he say to Gram and James about the anchor?

Sammy moved back to the motor, and Robin hauled up the traps, one empty, two empty. When he had the traps on board, while Sammy drove the boat in a wide circle, Robin wound the line around the float and jammed it back into the traps, just the way they had been on the way out. Robin was having a good time anyway.

The final trap had a crab in it. Robin turned around to face Sammy, his face almost split in half by his smile. “Look. Look at this, Sammy. I caught one.”

Inside the metal grid of the trap the crab looked huge. It was probably six-and-a-half or seven inches from point to point.

“You almost never get one that big this early,” Sammy congratulated him.

The crab's shell was browned with living through the winter. It glared out from the metal box, which swung at the end of the line Robin held. Its high round eyes looked like they personally hated Robin and Sammy.

“I caught it!” Robin yelled. “I caught a crab! My first time!”

Sammy could remember how that felt. He could remember why Robin was so excited. The crab tried to move its big front claws, to raise them out and threaten its captors, but the cage was too small. Its eyes glared and spittle appeared at its mouth. The claws pushed against the sides of the trap, as if the crab was trying to bend them.

Sammy felt for that crab, which was pretty funny considering the number of crabs he had plopped down into bushel baskets, or plopped down into steaming water, or plopped down into his mouth for that matter.

“Open the door and let it go,” he called forward. “We've got to get back, and pretty fast.” The wind
was
rising. Robin was having trouble keeping balance as the boat bucked under them.

“I can't keep it?”

Sammy shook his head. Robin wanted to ask again, but Sammy shook his head again. Robin obeyed. He shook the trap out over the water until the downside door opened. The big crab, almost as if he didn't trust this trick either, clung for a minute, one of his pincers locked around a strand of metal. Then the boat dipped down into the trough of a wave and water splashed up onto the crab, which let go and fell free.

Robin returned to the middle seat and Sammy opened the throttle. The nose of the boat rose up as they bounced their way home. The wind was against them, the waves were against them, and heavy spray splashed up wildly. Spray rained down over them, cold and wet. Robin's hair strung down along the side of his face. Sammy's cheeks stung and his left shoulder was soaked. It was almost dangerous out there, and they looked at one another to laugh out loud together at the wildness of it.

S
ammy leaned his elbows on the table and rested his chin on the palm of a hand. He yawned. After the confusion of the afternoon, of feelings and thoughts, of weather and people, it was good to sit in his own kitchen, warm, dry, his stomach full. He saw that Maybeth hadn't taken more than a couple of bites of her cake. “Can I finish that?” he asked her. She passed the plate over to him.

Sammy wasn't hungry. In fact, he was full, but he wanted the taste of chocolate in his mouth. James was eating away at his second big piece of cake as if he were still really hungry—maybe he was. Maybe James was the kind of person nothing was enough to satisfy, nothing filled up. Eating lazily, his chin still resting on his hand, Sammy felt sorry for James—because you'd always be hungry, for all kinds of things, for friends and grades and other things to do. You'd always be seeing what might be coming up next and not what was there now.

Sammy saw what was there now, and he was satisfied. Yeah, but that was why James would always do better than other people. James would always be moving forward, looking at new ideas; he'd keep on discovering things, while Sammy—

Sammy dropped his fork down on his plate. He'd already swallowed the bite that was too much, the one that turned full into stuffed. He felt heavy and overfed, and as if he'd never be
able to move from the table. He envied James his unfillable appetite.

And his brains, too, the way they kept him out of trouble or got him out of trouble. The chocolate taste in Sammy's mouth was too sweet now, and bitter. He got up to pour himself a little more milk, to wash it away. Robin had gone home and it was time to tell them about the anchor. He stood at the counter and looked at his grandmother. They'd give him an earful, he knew that. He dove into trouble like going off the dock. “I lost the anchor this afternoon.”

His grandmother looked at him and he looked right back at her, ready to get angry back. But she didn't say anything. Maybeth didn't even raise her head. It was James who jumped in. “You lost the anchor?” James sounded as if he couldn't believe what he'd heard.

Sammy nodded his head.

“How could you do something like that?”

Sammy shrugged. There was nothing to say. If James had asked
how
it had happened, that was a question he could answer. But James didn't want to know that—that was one of the few things in the world James wasn't curious to know, because all James wanted was to feel superior.

“Anchors aren't free,” James pointed out.

Sammy nodded.

Gram wasn't angry after all. She was looking at him as if she were thinking hard. “I set it,” Sammy explained to her, “to show Robin how and because drifting makes him nervous, and there was a wind.” He tried to explain how the anchor had to be left behind, not trying to pretend he hadn't made any mistakes. He wasn't trying to convince them he thought he had done something right. When he finished he sat down again.

James was pretty disgusted with him and Gram was
disappointed. The only one who didn't have anything to say was Maybeth. She'd been pretty quiet, too, all through dinner, but then Maybeth was like Robin in that way, shy, needing to be taken care of. Sometimes, Sammy thought, it was better to be gotten mad at. Sometimes, he stared at Maybeth's head with its soft, shining golden curls, sometimes he could understand why his father had just taken off.

“How are you going to earn the money to replace it without the anchor to have in the boat so you can go out crabbing?” James asked, being logical.

James didn't need to say that; Sammy could think of that all by himself without anybody telling him. He'd already thought of that difficulty.

“We'll replace it,” Gram told James. “You'll have to reimburse us,” she told Sammy.

As if Sammy didn't already know that. As if he wasn't planning to.

“You should have waited for a calm day, anyway,” James pointed out. “You didn't have to go out this afternoon. You knew Robin didn't know anything about boats. Or taken someone else along with you,” he suggested.

Yeah, but it was too late now.

“Or tied a life preserver to the line. Then we could have gone back and had a chance of recovering the anchor,” James went on.

“Or one of the bailers, which are easy to replace,” Gram suggested.