Salty Sky (15 page)

The captain was talking with Tony and almost overshot the bar they wanted. Once the boat was appropriately situated, Joe and Tony hopped off, followed by the trainers. Joe figured the trainers would stick close through dinner to save money. He thought it might be worth it to give them money to go eat elsewhere but didn’t want to
set a precedent. He brought a stack of cash to close out after each drink so they wouldn’t run up a tab. He didn’t put it past them to buy champagne or expensive liquor on his tab for some girl they were afraid to talk to but wanted to impress.

ASHLEY’S GROUP GOT
drinks and played cornhole. A few enlisted guys happy to be both out of the desert and off the base joined them. Ashley bought the marines a round in appreciation of their service. She paired with Van, and they won their first two cornhole games before losing and having to sit out.

She noticed the parking lot was filled up and the dock thinned out as the nighttime crowd drove over and the daytime crowd took off after a long day of sun and drinks. She watched Joe’s big boat plow up the channel before quickly shedding speed. The captain steered the boat into a hover beside the main walkway to let everybody off. He then took the boat down to the slip. She walked a few yards away from the group to watch him work the boat into the slip. He used the remote control as he walked around the deck, using different engines to keep the boat between the pylons and the walkway. Finally, he tossed lines to a deckhand, who helped him secure the boat.

JOE HEADED TO
the bar and ordered a bucket of PBR. If there were too many calories in the Pabst, then the trainers could buy their own beers. They got the bartender to find the Yankees game. The Yankees were up in the third. There was a good chance they’d make the series this year. It was still strange to see someone other than Jeter wearing the captain’s band.

Shouting caught Joe’s attention. He turned to see his nephew
holding one of the nurse’s arms, spittle coming out of his barking mouth. Joe said, “What the—” and stopped, letting his head droop.

“
Paesano
, that boy pisses in his own cornflakes,” Tony said, shaking his head side to side.

“Hey, Tony, you think it’s too late to sign him up for military school?”

“Military schools are too close to home. Let’s check on the Merchant Marine.”

ASHLEY SAW GINO
pull her friend off a wall and onto her feet by her arm. He then pushed the guy with the sunburned feet over the wall into the plantings. That brought heat to her ears that she was sure flushed her face red. She wanted to slap Gino harder than she knew how. If it cost her getting reimbursed for her mirror, so be it. If the trip ended tonight, she was OK with that too.

In that moment, she wasn’t seeing Gino pulling her friend off a wall, but her dad pulling her mom out of the recliner that defined their double-wide’s living room. Growing up, Ashley spent as little time at home as possible. She tried to come home as close to dinnertime as she could. Sometimes she’d find Mom sprawled in the recliner, deep in an alcohol-induced slumber, her body at angles that would normally keep a human from falling asleep. The platinum-dyed top layer of hair, which usually magnified her sexuality, appeared grotesquely artificial against her brown roots in that unnatural position. When her mom was day drunk, her responsibilities were always half done. Maybe the clothes brought back from the community laundry facility, wet and ready to hang, were piled on the floor at her feet. Her tight and short polyester dress was wet where the clothes sat before they slipped down to the dirt-tracked floor and her chipped toenails. Or maybe there was a half-finished dinner—peas, carrots, and corn,
partially boiled, peeled, and shucked, a store-bought lasagna starting to smoke in the twenty-four-inch-wide range.

If she found the bottle, empty or not, Ashley tossed it. Then it was the sprint to get Mom up before Dad came home.

“Mom! Wake up. Mom, you need to get up!”

A mumbled reply, “Go back to bed, Ashley … just a bad dream.”

She would pull on her mom’s eyelids with her fingers, slip a finger into her throat, pinch her cheeks—anything to induce a reaction. “Mom, you have to get up.”

Another mumble. “Ash, you’re home from … early … school.”

Then she’d stand in front of her mom and try to pull her up, hoping when her body became vertical that she’d remember to engage her own muscles before gravity took them both down.

Sometimes it worked, and her mom got coherent while Ashley completed the unfinished chores—hung the clothes, removed the layer of burnt cheese, opened the windows to get the smoke out. Sometimes Ashley got home too late to get things fixed. At the time, she felt it was her fault for not wanting to be at home. Now, she knew it wasn’t her fault, but emotionally, she still felt it. If her mom could have just let her know when she would be a mess, Ashley would have come back early or not left at all. But would it be twice this month or four times this week? There wasn’t a pattern Ashley could pick up on, and she blamed herself.

If Ashley got there too late, her dad would be home before her mom was up. He’d see Ashley pulling on his wife. He’d see Ashley frantically doing his wife’s chores, hoping she’d have better success waking her mom later but still before he arrived.

He was quiet in these moments. If Ashley wouldn’t leave her mom’s side, he might backhand her. Not in anger. Short slaps to keep household order. Certainly nothing like the belt-buckle-inflicted scars he collected on his back and legs growing up.

When he got Ashley out of the way, he would take his wife by an
arm and drag her out of the chair. He’d let her fall as her body wanted. If her head did or didn’t hit the floor, it didn’t seem to matter to him. If her dress caught an edge and ripped, he just kept pulling. He’d pull her down the short hallway, past the trailer’s bathroom, and past Ashley’s closet-size room to the master.

He’d shut the door to their room. She could hear her mom being dragged onto her bed by that arm. Then she’d hear the shuffling as her clothes were pulled up or off and he did the same with his own. And then she’d hear her dad start in on her. In such a small home, devoid of sound insulation, there are no secrets in good times or in bad, and in this home, the bad had far outnumbered the good. Her mom always woke up before her dad finished. There would be a change in the sounds—some brief struggling, then acceptance, and occasionally excitement. It wasn’t exactly rape, at least her mom never thought of it that way. But it identified more closely with punishment than pleasure for all in the household.

So now, seeing Gino pull her friend up made Ashley too angry to see straight. A crowd had formed between her and her friend. She saw the guy with the floral shorts fly in from a different angle to stand nose to nose with Gino. She fought to get through the crowd, ready to unload on Gino wherever she could hit him.

JOE SIGHED, THEN
hustled toward Gino. He slipped the fray, grabbed Gino’s thumb, and got him to release the girl’s arm. Without releasing Gino, Joe turned to Ashley, who appeared behind him, and handed her money from his shirt pocket.

He whispered in her ear, “I’ll fly these goombahs home tomorrow. Why don’t you and your friends get a hotel tonight? Try to be back to the boat by noon tomorrow. Captain says we have a five-hour ride to our next stop.”

Her eyes went from angry to vulnerable as he spoke. He saw her hands were in fists that slowly relaxed. She nodded, understanding.

Walking to the bar, Joe belatedly turned back to apologize to the nurse for Gino’s behavior, but she wasn’t looking his way. He noticed the bachelor being helped out of the bushes and onto his feet. He didn’t seem any worse for wear. His pride wasn’t even dented; he was cracking jokes before he had even gotten the planter’s dirt brushed off. He’d gone from romance to conflict to the bushes and then to joking and ready for romance again.

ASHLEY LOOKED AT
her friend’s arm and saw the red finger impressions that would be bruises by morning. What did Joe call Gino?
Goombah
? That was a new one for her. She thought Joe was wonderful but had panicked over how he was going to react when she saw him get to Gino before she did. Would he support his nephew just because he was his nephew? She was unconsciously putting TV-land, father-figure expectations on Joe, thinking he must support right over blood instinctually with a level of ethics she never experienced from her father. This expectation of someone to behave as a father figure was a new one for her. She had never let herself put these expectations even on Chief.

There was no fun for her friend left at this bar with Gino still present. The group prepared to leave, and Ashley tried to catch Joe’s attention. He and Tony were laughing, pointing, and facing the TV.