The Hair of Harold Roux (6 page)

“It’s funny how pretty it gets once you’re out on the ocean,” Mark said.

They came to some delapidated-looking wharves, finally, with shacks, houses and house trailers set behind them above the high-tide mark. In the cove were lobster boats, skiffs, dories with rusty outboard motors, and several larger fishing boats. Lobster buoys bobbed here and there among them. Along the shore were old boxes, piles of lobster traps, beer cans, signs, flotsam: the whole place was junky, cluttered—a familiar American scene, revealing that no one had a way of looking at anything whole. One of the fishing boat operators had built his house here, and amid rocks, kelp-strewn sand, odd fifty-five-gallon drums and piles of clamshells being picked over by gulls, was his little quarter-acre featuring the square pink box of a house and a bit of lawn with a white plastic goose leading her white plastic goslings across it. Thus
we re-create our beloved and magic nature in plastic. As usual, cars were everywhere, operable and inoperable. Beyond the point was the real blue ocean.

They parked and walked down to one of the wharves where a white boat, about thirty feet long, rose and fell gently, rubbing its burlap fenders against the pilings. Mark explained that Billy had bought the hull from the Navy and remade the boat himself. It didn’t look like a sport-fishing boat at all, but more like a thin tugboat.

As they came nearer, Aaron read its name from the side of the wheelhouse.

FRODO B.

EAST COVE

“Dear old Frodo,” Mark said. Aaron had read the Tolkien books a few years before, mainly out of self-defense (he didn’t care much for fantasy), but he’d found himself dreaming along with Frodo Baggins toward “Mordor where the shadows lie” with nearly as much fascination as his students. The experience had startled him, and given him some somber thoughts about literature, about its power and purpose. Tolkien’s prose was so banal, yet a broader, deeper metaphor had rung its dark tones there in the somewhat silly volumes, and he came away from them haunted by life. To see Frodo’s name now, so carefully painted on the white boat, seemed almost a violation, the theft of something from its proper element.

“Ores and goblins,” Mark said. “Balrogs, gollums and nazguls. Wait till you see the Joe’s Spa Troops.”

“Why should I want to see them?”

“To use one of your favorite expressions, Professor, ‘the fascination of the abomination.’“

“The abomination is all around me and I’m sick of it. I’m up to my ass in the abomination. I get the abomination delivered every morning before breakfast. I don’t have to go looking for the abomination.”

“Ah, but you do, Aaron. Frodo had to go to Mount Doom, and you have to go to the abomination.” Mark thought this was extremely funny, and he was still hissing and percussing with his strange laughter when a tall blond boy came out of the wheelhouse of the
Frodo
S. Mark explained, as soon as he could speak, that this was Captain Billy. Captain Billy, somehow immensely calm, smiled and said hello. He wore faded dungarees, sneakers and a yachting cap—all of these items cured down to the basic weave. His shoulder-length blond hair actually seemed to glimmer, and Aaron was reminded of the illustrations in a book he’d had as a child:
Hans Brinker
: Or,
the Silver Skates
. Was that it, or was it the Dutch boy on the paint can, with his blond bangs and cap? But there was a feeling of purity about Captain Billy, of simplicity and strength, a fantasy in which handsomeness equaled goodness, as in Tolkien.

“His real name, of course, is Aragorn,” Mark said. “And, as you know, I am Gandalf the Gray.”

Captain Billy gazed seriously down at Mark. “I always thought of you as more of a Hobbit,” he said. His pale blue eyes caught the light and seemed for a moment hollow, like cerulean-tinted spheres of glass.

Mark laughed, while Captain Billy continued to gaze at him seriously.

They went on board the
Frodo
B., where Captain Billy explained their probable duties. The Joe’s Spa Troops would, no doubt, quickly entangle all their handlines, and when they gave up trying to untangle them they would sneakily throw them overboard and come to get new ones. Each handline, with its hook, leader, sinker and wooden stretcher, was worth over a dollar, so this was to be discouraged as much as possible. And in general they were to keep an eye on things. If one of the Joe’s Spa Troops was about to fall overboard, for instance, they were to make him sit down. Fights should be discouraged, as should various kinds of monkey business that might occur. They should play it by ear.

The three of them sat on the
Frodo B.’s
thick-painted gray
benches in the sun, waiting—Aaron with more than a little anxiety—for the Joe’s Spa Troops’ chartered bus. The boat moved gently beneath them, and the smell of the cove was powerful: that salty compound of life and rot, chemical, natural, speaking of the dense life of the sea. Through the fathom of water below the boat Aaron could see clamshells on the mud bottom, and crabs moving sideways over white strings of fish parts someone had thrown out. This deep window was only in the shadow of the boat; beyond the shadow the water turned a bright reflecting blue again.

When the bus finally came, it was three-quarters of an hour late, having had a flat tire, and the troops had obviously been at the booze. They filed slowly out the front door, a little too careful of the steps. Some carried spinning rods and tackle, but most carried, with many grunts and deep breaths, cases of beer, plastic coolers, and cardboard boxes of food. The logistics of the operation were complicated. Aaron, Mark and Captain Billy soon took over the stowage not only of the supplies but of several of the troops, who would never have been able to come down the short gangplank on their own.

They were men from their late twenties to early fifties, but all their faces, beneath their sporty hats or long-billed caps, were equally blasted, the younger haunted by the finalities of the older. Except for the starved, thin bodies of the burnt-out, gut-trouble types, most were soft-bellied. Though thin elsewhere, they carried a feminine roll over the hips, and navels or pale hairy mounds of flesh were visible between T-shirts and low-slung belts, or between the gaps of printed sport shirts. Perhaps the younger were quieter. Flesh colors were tones of gray; they must all have worked indoors, and in their evenings at Joe’s Spa (all their evenings) the television set above the bar must have chrome-tanned them into its own metallic tones. There were shades of green, or of bruised blue—all on the side of the spectrum away from blood and life, toward the dank, the enclosed.

They were laughing and yelling jokes to each other, these wraiths, these gross phantoms, and if Aaron didn’t listen to
the words it did seem that they were laughing and tossing jokes back and forth. But at a dreadful click of the attention the jokes were not funny, were unstructured, referenceless. The words didn’t matter.

“Hey, Ooligah!”

“Bafundam! Yuk! Yuk!”

“Hornish gaw unner a seat!”

—Screams of virile raggedness.

“Bustis fuckin’ head!”

“Watcher language, Meathead.’“

“Hey, Ollie! Hey,
Oilier

God, Aaron thought. These poor, deprived organisms. Given so little in the first place, what had they done to themselves? How could a man of approximately thirty have abused himself into such cretinous shape as that one, whose left eye had migrated too far toward his nose, like a flounder’s, whose very expression of dangerous toughness seemed to have caused that evil drift?

Mark caught Aaron’s eye, and grinned. Among these goblins Mark was suddenly strong, even handsome, and Captain Billy was certainly part Elven, a reflection of God’s true aspirations for the evil race. Aaron caught the Joe’s Spa Troops looking at Mark’s and Captain Billy’s hair, and smirking, the little secret of their opinions of course unkept.

Some of them were strangely lethargic, and took their positions at the rail with dull, unexpectant stares. Later these would spend much of their time afloat picking helplessly and hopelessly at their snarled handlines. Their apparent leader, or the organizer of the outing, was a recognizably more intelligent man of fifty or so. Toward them all he seemed to have much affection. “They’re all good boys,” he said often in the face of much evidence to the contrary, even when, later, one of his boys vomited on the poop, where a plain sign said no one except crew should go. Vomited his thin beer-puke on the curved poop so that it dripped on the people below, then slid, half-conscious, in his own lubrication into the blue sea, from
which he was rescued by means of a gaff in the waist band of his slacks.

“See?” the leader said. “No fights. They’re good boys.”

But this came later. When everyone was aboard, Captain Billy started the big engines and steered them through the channel, past the point, into the heaves of the sea where a great bell buoy clanged them toward the immensities. Far out to the northeast were the Isles of Shoals, gray rocks low on the horizon; to the west the continent receded slowly under its yellowish pastel pall. They rode the swells into the clean blue, leaving in their wake a trail of beer cans, sandwich wrappers, aluminum foil and cigarette butts. White gulls scouted them from the horizons, soared low to examine their trash, and moved on, one or two staying always within sight. Later they would have their feast.

After an hour’s run from the land, Captain Billy circled for a while until, with the aid of his fathometer, he found the underwater ledges he wanted. Mark and Aaron dropped the anchor on its swiftly uncoiling hemp line; when it caught, the
Frodo B
. swung with the deep tide. Captain Billy ground some sand eels for chum in a kitchen meat grinder that was screwed to the deckhouse, and poured the thin gruel over the side.

“Bait up,” he said. Mark and Aaron distributed cans of sand eels to the troops, helping the more fastidious bait their hooks.

Soon they began to pull in cod, the smooth, lippy, innocent faces staring from the washtub in the middle of the afterdeck. When the tub was full, the plump, yellowish fish flopped on the deck in slime and spilled beer. There were periods without crisis when Aaron and Mark had little to do, but after a while a burnt-thin man in his late forties chose Aaron for his confidant. He had several bottles of ginger brandy in his tackle box, and insisted that Aaron try it. It was made, Aaron read from the label, in Detroit.

“I was in on the invasion of Germany,” the man said. He was at first not obviously drunk. “Invasion of Germany—most
fortified country in the world.” He shook his head. “Most fortified country in the world.”

Aaron thought he had missed the reference, but soon he found that, as with the jokes of the day, there was none. The thin, stringy, banty-like man, whose name—from an embossed tape glued to his tackle box—was Harry Remers, cast occasionally with his expensive and new-looking spinning outfit. He used a stainless-steel jig, disdaining cod and pollack. He wanted only mackerel.

“Left my wife ten years ago,” he said, his reddish eyes peering sincerely into Aaron’s. “Went back to her in six months. Who wants a mess of fucking cod?” He cast again, and slowly retrieved his jig. “Have a drink of this ginger brandy. It’s good.”

Aaron did.

“Let me tell you something. If a woman just lets you rub it around on the outside, it’s no good. Said it hurt all the time.”

Having retrieved his jig, he had a good slug of ginger brandy, then offered the bottle to Aaron, who had another medicinal, or anesthetic, slug of it himself.

“I was in on it, all right. Germany, most fortified country in the world.” He lit a cigarette with his Zippo, and tossed the lighter expertly back into his shirt pocket. “Good woman. Don’t complain. Stays home all the time. You follow me?”

Aaron nodded.

“I tell her I’m the only guy I know been married twenty-years to a virgin and she says don’t I let you rub it on me? Left her ten years ago. Went back in six months.”

The two gulls, on quivering, correcting wings, came back to check on the boat, their heads moving, one eye and then the other turned to scan. Someone at the stern threw a sand eel into the air, and both gulls watched it carefully but let it fall to the surface before they landed and squabbled briefly over it.

“You follow me?” Harry Remers said.

Aaron was suddenly dizzy. “I’ve got to go check the inlet ports,” he said, moving away.

“Hey!” Harry Remers called to him. “That was January 21, 1944! That’s a date to remember!”

“That’s right,” Aaron said. He went into the head to find the thirty-gallon galvanized can full and even sloshing over as the boat rolled. The stench pushed him back. He could see no drain or apparatus to remedy this, and it was nightmarish; the boat would soon be running scupper to scupper with these liquids and solids. He retched a little, fumes of Detroit ginger brandy scalding his nostrils, shut the door and went to Captain Billy.

“Jesus,” he said to the tall, calm captain. “The can in there’s sloshing over.” Captain Billy merely nodded, and went to take care of it. Soon he returned, his hands and clothes unsoiled, and Aaron never did find out how the job was done.

One of the troops had caught a skate about two feet in diameter. Lying flat on the deck, its brown eyes observed from the little pilothouse above its wings. Several of the troops looked at it with wonder and then did what was expected—furiously stabbed and stomped it to death until its eyes were squashed and its tough white flesh winked through gashes and tears in its blue-black skin. “Stingray! Stingray!” they yelled. Skate blood, red as a man’s, smeared the gray deck. One of the troops gaffed it and tossed the corpse back into the sea.

At Aaron’s elbow a pale, plump man in a straw fedora whispered fiercely to him. “See that guy over there?” he said, pointing guardedly at Harry Remers. “I want to tell you he’s the meanest, filthiest son of a bitch alive. The biggest prick-bastard alive.” Squinting, nodding, having made the point to his satisfaction, he staggered with righteous dignity toward the bow.

Down the line the man with the drifting eye vomited with the noise of a flushed toilet, and with nearly the volume,
then slowly leaned back from the rail, slid from the bench and lay on his back in the bilge.