Dogfight (8 page)

“This is my last cigarette,” he said. “You have till I am finished to get your ass up from the floor and out to the wagon for a new pack. Let me be clear. If you are not back before I put my boot on this
thing, I'm gonna beat you like a rented mule.” He spoke real slow like I was his Jap connection and my English wasn't so good. “Do you understand?”

I got to my feet reluctantly. I didn't want him to know that I was afraid. I said, “Gerald, you need anything?” Gerald shook his head and gave me a wave.

I sidled to the ladder and climbed it slow and easy, no hurry, but once topside, I was gone, the fastest white boy on earth, dumping equipment as I ran, a jackrabbit, skirting welders and shipfitters on the deck, clanging down the gangplank, then up over the cyclone fence, headed for the supply wagon. It was ninety-five degrees out, wet July heat in lower Alabama, but after the hold, it felt good, almost cold. Goose bumps rose lightly on my skin.

Wishbone got off on razzing me. White kid, sixteen, owner's nephew, gone with the summer anyhow. I was his wet dream. We had worked together for a week last summer, my first time on a welding crew, and even then he had no patience for me. He ignored me for the whole week, just looked away whenever I spoke, concentrated on the skittering sparks and pretended I wasn't there. The cigarette runs were a new addition, but I didn't mind so much. Probably, he wouldn't have roughed me up, if I had refused to play along. He would have been fired, maybe jailed, and he knew it, but I wasn't taking any chances.

Summers at the shipyard were a family tradition. Learn the value of a dollar by working hard for it, that sort of thing. I'd drag myself home in the evenings, caked with filth, feeling drained empty, like I'd spent the day donating blood, and there my sister would be, fresh and blonde and lovely, stretched languorously on the couch in front of the television. She'd have on white tennis shorts and maybe still be wearing her bikini top. She spent her summer days reading by the pool, her nights out with one boy or another. She had tattooed a rose just below her belly button by applying a decal and letting the sun darken the skin around it.

“Give me the fucking remote,” I'd say.

“Blow me.”

She was eighteen, off to the university in the fall. Fifty-one days, I'd tell myself, that's all. It was usually evening by the time I got home and the last of the daylight would be slanting in through the banks of long windows, making everything look dreamy and slow. My sister would yawn and change the channel just to show me she could.

“I'm gonna sit down now, Virginia, and take off my boots and socks,” I'd say. “You have until I am barefoot to hand it over or I will beat you like a rented mule.”

She would smile pretty, adjust her position on the couch so she was facing me, draw her smooth knees up to her belly, get comfortable. She'd yell, “Mo-om,” stretching the word into two hair-raising syllables, “Mom, Ford's acting tough again.”

Gerald brought a monkey book to the shipyard, smuggled it in under his coveralls, and the two of us sat around on a break flipping through it. He was an older man, nearing fifty, his dark skin drawn tight over his features, worn to a blunt fineness. He had been working for my uncle almost twenty years. Wishbone lay on his back with his fingers linked on his chest, washed in the rectangle of light that fell through to us. He owned the traces of breeze that drifted down through the hatch. I had the book open across my knees, a droplight in one hand, my back against the bluish-white wall. Gerald was kneeling in front of me, watching for my reaction.

“See there?” he said. “See where it says about spider monkeys make the best pets?”

He reached over the book and tapped a page, leaving a sweaty fingerprint. I flipped pages, looking for the passage that he wanted, past capuchins and Guerezas with their skunk coloring, past howler monkeys and macaques, until I came to the section on spider monkeys. I said, “Okay, I got it.”

“Read it to me,” he said.

I cleared my throat. “Spider monkey,
Ateles paniscus,
characterized
by slenderness and agility. They frequent, in small bands, the tallest forest trees, moving swiftly by astonishing leaps, sprawling out like spiders, and catching by their perfectly prehensile tails. Their faces are shaded by projecting hairs, blah, blah, blah, ten species between Brazil and central Mexico …” I skimmed along the page with the droplight. “Okay, here we go. They are mild, intelligent, and make interesting pets. There it is, Gerald.”

I tried to hand him the book, but he pushed it back to me.

“Look at the pitcher,” he said. “Look at those sad faces.”

In the middle of the page was a close-up photograph of two baby spider monkeys. Gerald was right about their faces. They did look sad and maybe a little frightened, their wide eyes full of unvoiced expression, like human children, their hair mussed as if from sleep, their mouths turned down slightly in stubborn monkey frowns.

“Don't nobody got a monkey,” Gerald said.

“Michael fucking Jackson got a monkey,” Wishbone said.

We turned to look at him. He hadn't moved, was still stretched in the light, legs straight as a corpse. I had thought he was asleep. Gerald said, “Michael Jackson's nobody I know.”

“Michael Jackson has a
chimpanzee,
Wishbone,” I said. “There's a difference.”

Wishbone sat up slowly, drew in one knee, and slung his arm over it. He looked handsome, almost beautiful in the harsh sunlight, his eyes narrow, his smile easy, perspiration beaded on his dark face. He looked so mysterious, just then, I thought that if I could catch him in the right light, strike a match at an exact moment, I would see diamonds or something beneath the surface of his skin.

He got to his feet, walked over, and squatted in front of me. He snatched the book from my hands. “The food of the spider monkey is mainly fruit and insects.” Wishbone enunciated each word carefully. He winked at Gerald, then leaned toward me until his face was close enough to mine that I could feel his breath on my cheeks. “In certain countries, their flesh is considered a delicacy.” He closed the book and passed it to Gerald without taking his eyes from me. He
rooted around under his coveralls, found what he was looking for, and dangled it in front of me. “You know the routine,” he said, an empty cigarette pack between two fingers.

I took my time on Wishbone's errand. He hadn't given me a countdown so I thought I'd at least make him wait a while for his nicotine. The shipyard was on skeleton crew since we lost the navy contract—four hundred people out of work at my uncle's company alone—and the
Kaga
was one of only three ships in for repairs, leaving seven dry docks empty, rising up along the waterfront like vacant stadiums. I wandered into the next yard over, yard five, thinking about Gerald's monkey. I wondered if Wishbone could actually get it for him or if that was just talk. I hoped he could for Gerald's sake. Cruel to lead him on. I had this picture in my head of Gerald at home in an easy chair, the television on in front of him and this spider monkey next to him on the arm of the chair, curling its tail around his shoulders. It was a nice picture. They were sharing an orange, each of them slipping damp wedges of fruit into the other's mouth.

I could hear the lifting cranes churning behind me, men shouting, metal banging on metal but yard five was still and quiet. Dust puffed up beneath my steps. The infrequent wind made me shiver. Two rails set wide apart, used for launching ships, ran down to the water's edge and I balanced myself on one and teetered down the slope to the water. A barge lumbered along the river with seagulls turning circles in the air above it.

When I was nine years old, my parents took me to the launching of a two-hundred-foot yacht, the
Marie Paul,
built here for a California millionaire. My family had been invited for the maiden voyage, and we mingled with the beautiful strangers under a striped party tent, which sheltered a banquet of food and champagne and where a Dixieland band fizzed on an improvised stage in the corner. There were tuxedos and spangled cocktail dresses along with the canary-yellow hard hats that my uncle required. The women from
California wore short dresses, dresses my mother never would have worn, exposing tan and slender legs that seemed to grow longer when they danced.

One of these women proclaimed me the cutest thing in my miniature tuxedo and hard hat. She hauled me away to dance, my mother shooing me politely along despite my protests. We did the stiff-legged foxtrot that Mother and I did at home, the only dance I knew. “Loosen up, baby,” the woman said, stepping away from me after only a few turns. “Dance like you mean it.” She shimmied around me, overwhelmed me, the rustle of her dress and swish of her hair, her hands slipping over my arms and shoulders, her perfume and warm champagne breath, her brown thighs gliding together, her exposed throat and collarbone. This woman did the christening, shattering a bottle of champagne on the prow. The
Marie Paul
was the most magnificent thing I'd ever seen, with a sleek stern and muscular bow, like a tapered waist and broad chest. It was polished incandescent white with a swimming pool at the rear, a helicopter pad on the topmost deck, and four Boston Whalers to serve as landing craft strapped to the foredeck and covered with purple tarp. Workmen on overtime scurried in its shadow, double-checking. My dance partner was tiny beneath its bulk.

Ships are launched sideways, set on giant rollers and drawn down the tracks with heavy cable. When that one hit the water and careened to starboard, sending up a tidal wave of spray, I thought she would go under, that she would keep rolling, slip beneath the slow, brown water and go bubbling to the bottom. I screamed in panic and shut my eyes. My mother pulled me against her leg and said, “It's all right, Ford, honey. Look, it won't sink. See, it's fine.” The
Marie Paul
found her balance, came swaying upright, thick waves rushing away from her on both sides, as if drawn ashore by our cheering. Tugboats motored in, like royal attendants, to push her out to deeper water.

I met my uncle on my way back from the supply wagon. He was giving three Japanese men a tour of the yard, all of them in business
suits and yellow hard hats. When he spotted me, he yelled my name and waved me over. I stashed Wishbone's cigarettes in my pocket.

“I'd like you gentlemen to meet my nephew,” my uncle said, slapping my shoulder. “He's learning the business from the ground up.”

I wiped my palms on my coveralls and shook the hands that were offered. Each of the men gave me a crisp bow. They wore black leather shoes, recently filmed over with dust. Since last summer, I had grown three inches. I had my uncle's size, now, and both of us towered over them.

“Hard work,” the oldest man said. He made his voice stern and gravelly, as if to imply that physical labor was good for you.

“Yes, sir.”

“You better believe it,” my uncle said. “No cakewalk for this boy.”

My uncle was grooming me. He had no children of his own. Money-wise, my old man did all right as well, exploring the wonders of gynecology, but as I had thus far displayed a distinct lack of biological acumen in school, my parents viewed the shipyard as the best course for my future. My father's routine sounded considerably more pleasant, but I didn't argue.

“Ford, these gentlemen own the
Kaga.
” My uncle put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “They're thinking about letting us build them another one. Wanted to see a work in progress.”

“She's a fine boat,” I said and they bowed again.

“Arigato.”

Normally, there was a cluster of men dawdling at the supply wagon but there were no customers now. No one wanted to be caught loafing. All around us, men were busy at their jobs—swarming on deck, unloading a hauling truck over by the warehouse—like a movie version of a bustling shipyard. The air had a faint tar smell and was full of wild echoes, the resolute clamor of progress, the necessary bang of making something from nothing. If you stepped back from it a second, weren't sweating in the guts of the thing, it was sort of heartening. You could almost see giant ships growing up out of the ground.

“Well,” my uncle said. “Back to the grind, boy.”

When I returned to the
Kaga
with Wishbone's cigarettes, I heard voices drifting up from the hold, and I knew that he and Gerald hadn't yet gone back to work. There was an unspoken understanding among the men, a costly one if my uncle got wind of it. The longer a ship stayed in dry dock, the longer you had a job. My first summer at the yard, I was an industrious dervish, anxious to learn, eager to make a good impression. It wasn't long before I figured out why no one wanted me on their crew. If I worked too hard, they kept up, afraid that I might inform the higher powers. These men walked a fine line. The ships had to be repaired in reasonable time, of course, or there would be no business at all, but if they were finished too quickly, it might seem as if fewer men were needed, or the interval before the next ship arrived might be long enough that layoffs became necessary. The work had to be timed perfectly, not too slow or too fast, or the balance would be upset. It wasn't laziness that slowed the work, as my uncle complained, it was fear. Except Wishbone. I don't know what slowed him down. Wishbone wasn't afraid of anything that I could tell.

I took off my hard hat, belly-crawled to the hatch, and hung myself silently over to watch them. Gerald and Wishbone were on their backs with their feet propped against the far wall, passing a joint between them, its glowing tip visible in the semidarkness. They were giggling like stoned schoolboys.

“Whadju tell him?” Wishbone was talking now, holding the joint between two fingers, blowing lightly on the coal. He dragged, offered it to Gerald, but Gerald waved it away.

“I said, ‘Yo dumbass, standing on a trip wire and you want me to stay and
talk?'
Boy want somebody to keep him company while we wait for the EOC. Don't explode when you step on it, see. They blow when you step off, get the guy behind you, which in this case is me. I said, ‘You crazy as you are dumb.'”