Water Lessons (13 page)

"Howdy," she nodded, blinking frequently and smiling ever so slowly.

Jim detected a hint of curiosity in her look. "Friends of the Henrettys? Then y'all are friends of mine."

"I hear you're getting into sails?" Jack spoke with a bit of the lilt Jim had heard throughout eastern Massachusetts.

"I'm learning from the best." Jim raised and stomped one foot. "The Commodore's reputation precedes him. And I'm in the best portion of the country to learn the craft."

"You're dead on, man," Jack said. "Florida may be the ideal in many ways, but if you love history and you're more of a sailing
purist
, then you want to learn it here. Despite that we may get only five navigable months."

"I'm glad the first of the five is now underway," Jim said. "It makes us all appreciate the spring and summer more."

Natasha's eyes raked Jim up and down.

"Don't you just love this amazing house?" Jim said. "The old beams on the ceilings, the fireplace over there that a man could nearly stand in. And the oak framing and the pine floors and walls. These old colonial homes were built to last."

"Yes," Natasha said. "I don't believe
slaves
were used to build this one."

"Tasha!" Jack glared at his girlfriend.

"Absolutely the worst thing you could say to Jim," Maureen said. "Trust me."

"Ouch. I wasn't ready for that one, my dear," Jim said, jerked from the cozy nonchalance of his bourbon buzz and narrowing his eyes at Natasha. He raised his arms halfway over his head as if in surrender. "I fear you might've been waiting a long time to hit a Southern boy with that barbed little zinger."

"But she means it out of
love
, Jim," Jack put his hand on his girlfriend's shoulder, laughing.

Jim was almost as shaken as he had been at the Back Bay party. That same tingling heat crept about his head and ran down his spine. Though frustrated at this unexpected rudeness, he couldn't stifle a nervous laugh.

"Easy, Tasha," Jack said. "He's had one rough last year, from what I've heard."

Jim raised his finger for emphasis. "I
know
from our honored friend Walter that this house was built in 1810. Not as old as many in New England. Massachusetts was the first state to outlaw the sale or importation of slaves, in 1796. But slaves were still used here far past that date. So, one or a few slaves
could
have helped to build this home. And one must also recognize this state's indulgence in bonded servants and child labor—and the de facto
human trafficking
in all the plentiful Irish immigrants, Miss
Boyle
." Jim uttered the last word with a nod of the head, all the while holding her gaze.

"He is right, my dear," Jack said.

With amusement, Natasha scrutinized Jim's light brown linen jacket, white cotton dress-shirt, and cream-colored khakis, worn in traditional Scoresby fashion with alligator skin cowboy boots.

"I definitely dig the boots," Natasha said with a taint of condescension.

"It's his personal style," Maureen said. "But I did see that combination around the Garden District in New Orleans. Jim didn't invent it."

"I like this guy. You're quite the cowboy gentleman!" Jack backed up a step and studied Jim with an air of playfulness. "You are the Cajun Colonel Sanders, no doubt!"

"That's a first," Jim said. "Well, to utter the hackneyed phrase, 'So, what do you do?'"

"I own Datagenesis. An identity management software startup in Quincy."

"And he lives in Chatham!" Maureen said. "At the elbow of the Cape. Now
that
is a commute."

"Indeed, Jack. You make that haul every day?" Jim said.

"Like our friend, the Commodore. I work from home, but every two or three days I'll pop up to Quincy just to make sure things are running fine."

"You should see his office at home," Maureen said. "There's a bay window maybe twelve feet tall by thirty feet wide, and Jack's desk is up against it. He can watch the Chatham shoals while he makes his calls."

"The infamous Chatham shoals," Jim said. "Site of the most daring rescue in Coast Guard history. Those shoals are probably as treacherous as Cape Hatteras in Carolina. Yeah, I've seen that old hotel y'all have out there with those white rocking chairs on the porch, overlooking the rocks."

At Jack's side, Natasha was as cold and immobile as stone. There was a moment of silence.

Jim sipped from his glass of bourbon, cleared his throat and said, "I must say I'm definitely, definitely glad to be here on the Cape."

"You and I and my dad and Walt should go out on the water soon," Jack said. "We fish a lot, mainly in my motorboat. In a few weeks the bluefish will be out. You can catch stripers, over two feet long. Toward late June, we go farther out and you can get some good tuna and bonito. Walt can give you my number."

"I'd like that." Jim reached out his hand and shook Jack's. He then thought to offer it to Natasha, and playfully looked at her askance with distrust.

She shook his hand without enthusiasm and withdrew hers quickly.

"Ha, ha!" Jack laughed. "Now you have gotten a little intro to Tasha, eh? She'll grow on you though. And she's a mean cook, you should see! And she can crew like the best of 'em."

"It was nice meeting you all," Jim said and waved farewell. Maureen followed suit, and they proceeded into the crowd.

"Let's locate the hors d'oeuvres. I'm
hung-gree
,"
 

Maureen moaned.

Jim always smiled when she said that, and she at times inquired as to the reason for his amusement. Jim never admitted it, but Maureen's teenage-athlete appetite had expanded her hips and buttocks, and he liked it just fine, though Jim knew she was perhaps three of her vanilla lattes shy of being joke fodder for Patrick.

A throng of guests mobbed the table across the room, and Jim and Maureen were swallowed up in it. Maureen prepared a plate of crab claws and cocktail sauce, scallop cakes, jumbo shrimp, and stuffed mushrooms. They emerged from the crowd and walked a few paces before Jim noticed someone studying him with a curious gaze.

"All this seafood remind ya of home, young man?" an elderly man said.

"You read my mind, sir. It's completely different here, but I love it all the same. I could eat chowder every day. I actually did my first two months in New England."

"Chowda, young man," the old man said. "Ya gotta say chow-da. I tell ya, I watched that hurricane coverage and ya know, your state looked worse than a third-world country: the corrupt politicians and police, so many of the people destitute! I was deployed with the army in Hiroshima after we dropped the A-bomb on it. It looked bettah over there than New Orleans did."

"Well, kind sir, I'm Jim Scoresby." He offered the old man his hand.

The old man took it firmly. "Dick Winslow, son."

"Mr. Winslow, I don't think anyone can fault you for a lack of honesty."

The old man gave a sort of pirate's laugh. Jim turned toward Maureen. His badly bruised forearm ached, and now he felt a great knot in his back, between his shoulders.

"Son, really… how's ya family, I wanted ta ask?"

Jim shot him a piercing glance. Something inside Jim sizzled and popped, like a bubble had burst and then settled down to cool. Jim discerned the man's genuine concern, and remembered that first wave of Katrina volunteers in the Maravich Center. "They're doing better, much better."

"
That
is good," Dick Winslow nodded. The old man then vanished into the teeming crowd.

Jim jolted when Maureen touched his shoulder.

"Had about all you can take, eh?" she said.

"Sweetness, this boy could really use a li'l R and R on the porch out back. How 'bout it?"

They skirted the crowd's fringe, entered the hallway, and crossed the parlor where they had taken coffee with Walter earlier that morning. A few stragglers lounged about the couches and recliners, sipping their drinks and chatting.

Outside on the unlit deck, despite the temperate air and a sky replete with constellations, there was not a soul in sight. Maureen set the plate down on a small table.

Jim placed a hand on the wooden rail of the deck, gripped his whiskey glass in the other, and leaned over slightly. Maureen did the same, just to his side. Neither spoke.

The unobstructed gibbous moon illuminated the sprawling backyard, interrupted here and there by naturally occurring granite rocks of varying size. Off to the side a few gnarled trees grew in a copse, their growth stunted from a continuous bombardment by thousands of gales and the salty breath of the sea. Farther beyond rose the billowing dunes, their domes sprinkled with waving sea grass. Finally in the near distance sprawled the sublime Atlantic herself, seemingly waiting for Jim to notice her skin shimmering with lightly dancing wavelets, her fresh crisp scent wafting all about him in its striking glory.

Even at two hours before midnight, long after the descent of darkness, a few boats lingered on the water. A powerboat moved along, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. A minute passed of sheer silence.

"I know, Jim. You don't even have to tell me," Maureen said.

Jim had said it all before, and it was all futile. He stared out onto the Nantucket Sound. Yet Jim did not contemplate the ocean now, or anything to do with it.

He lifted the bourbon to his lips. The smoky sweet scent first brought to mind his father, the weary man he had left in the aftermath of that great storm of 2005, a period his father saw as the veritable afterglow of God's wrath. No doubt his father was at that moment sitting alone in his dark living room, while Jim's mother was in bed, set to rise before dawn to lead the Rosary before six-thirty Mass. His father would be sipping this very bourbon at this very minute, staring at the vacuum of the television screen. His mind would rest halfway on other matters, much as his son's eyes searched deeply inward, all the while scanning the moonlit waters.

Jim envisioned the ruddy cheeks and the gray hair of his father, the bangs hanging low onto the great brow. The head rested on the antique fabric of the Victorian chair, the swollen feet drawn up onto an ottoman.
 

This completed the image of a man worn down by decades spent poring over maps and logs. A man weary from endless hours on rig platforms in disappearing marshes, exhausted by the age-old struggle to find and seize treasure. A man further spent by the refuge sought in fine foods and drink and his few leisure hours before the mind-numbing glass screen.

Jim took another sip of the bourbon. The taste conjured up the old cedar-and-oak-walled corridors of Sewanee in those enchanted mountains of middle Tennessee, truly one of his favorite spots on earth, amidst a land thick with hardwoods and the occasional pine, with verdant valleys and waterfalls and massive rock outcrops and English Gothic buildings. He envisioned the nearby Monteagle Assembly, where the Tennessee cavalry and wily Rosecrans once chased each other through thicket and lane. One could still find log cabins from before that war—they smelled like the charred bellies of white oak distillery barrels.

Next in this display within Jim's mind came that day before the great storm. He saw himself parking Betty Sue back at his father's house in Folsom. Despite his father's angry shouting, Jim had insisted on leaving for New Orleans. And his father had wrestled him, their arms grappling, their hips plowing into sofas and chairs.
 

Jim saw himself speeding south across the twenty-four mile Causeway bridge through the night that harbored the fierce tempest, the conspirator holding the foul invader at her breast. But Jim was mainly concerned with finding Freddy, and his parents would not approve. All over the radio was talk of the threat of looters, and of the storm being the "Big One."

And then there on the Henrettys' back deck, he remembered looking down at Freddy's body sprawled on the roof one hundred feet below. He imagined all the places Freddy had seen, his performing for President Kennedy at the White House, his years playing the Las Vegas Stardust, his late nights performing with Louis Armstrong and Fats Domino. If those three men could have seen him dead on that roof, deserted by mankind, even by his closest family, they would have thought it an obscenity, a perverse travesty.
 

And just when Jim's city and his people could have used him most, he realized, Jim had fled. He had deserted them, like Freddy's own family and friends had deserted him in his time of need.

Still Jim did not weep, nor did his eyes even tear up as they had before—and it was always harder to avoid it all with the alcohol he consumed—and Maureen's hand did not stroke him on the back as it had on Marlborough Street the Sunday before. Instead, a familiar scent snapped Jim from his torturous thoughts.

Jim turned where he stood. Maureen pivoted with him. Their backs to the rail, they peered sideways along the full length of the unlit deck. All about them was that familiar, rich scent of Walter's pipe.

"Dad?" Maureen called.

A lone figure moved with slow, firm steps in the shadows, and then stopped. Walter puffed hard on his pipe, heating the bowl which cast the slightest glow onto his face and tweed coat. A thick puff of smoke rose from the bowl as Walter strolled toward them.

With his free hand, the old man slapped Jim on the shoulder. "Don't take it all so hard, bud. I know it ain't so easy speaking with the likes of my neighbor Winslow and that bitch Jack's about to marry, all in the course of a few minutes."

"Daaad!" Maureen said.

The old man gave a crooked grin, a wisp of smoke snaking devilishly from between his teeth. "It's hard, I know, son, getting adjusted to it all. We're crusty and reserved, often standoffish, and we can cut deep. But you make a friend in New England, and it's usually a friendship that lasts. Jack Spaulding is such a man. You guys will get along just fine. And always know there's always a place at my table and on my boats—and in the shop—for Jimmy Scoresby."

"Thanks, Walt. That really means a lot," Jim said, both astonished and amused the old man could read his very soul.

"You love writing. You're a lover of sails, literature, history." Walter punctuated his words with jabs in the air with his pipe. "You love seafood. You were meant to make your way up the coast to be with us! That's one reason you didn't drown today. Besides that, my Kathleen's a real lioness. Now you two enjoy your night."