Chapter 25
October 4
Testing, Testing
It’s a true sign of prudence not to want wisdom which extends beyond your share as an ordinary mortal, to be willing to overlook things along with the rest of the world or to wear your illusions with a good grace. People say this is really a sign of folly, and I’m not setting out to deny it — so long as they’ll admit on their side that this is the way to play the comedy of life.
Folly, in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Praise of Folly
WHEN I WENT DOWN to the dock to pump the launch dry, I found that someone was already there. From a distance, he looked like a hood from my school days. (If you were not around during my school days, reader, you may not know that hoods were bad boys, or boys who wanted to be mistaken for bad boys. They were a school generation ahead of my school generation; the style was already fading by the time I reached high school. Hoods wore black jeans and white T-shirts. They kept their cigarettes — no filters, natch — rolled in one sleeve of the T-shirt, exposing more of their lean but muscular arms. They greased their hair and combed it so that the sides swept back to meet in a shape called a DA, a duck’s ass. Some hoods drove hot rods, and some rode motorcycles. Some hoods had tattoos. Rockwell Kingman would have been a hood.) This guy was stripped to the waist in the brisk sunlight that had followed the storm. He was wearing black jeans, leaning over the side of the launch, arranging the hose that I usually used to pump the bilge. He seemed to know just how to do it — even to know just how I did it — but he looked as if he should have been working on a hot rod instead of the launch.
“Hello there,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Hey! Mr. Leroy!” he said, raising himself out of the bent-over position he’d been in, and wiping his hands on a rag. “How’s it goin’?”
I said, “Well — ah — it’s going okay, I guess, for the day after a hurricane. The hotel wasn’t washed into the bay, which I’m counting as a Good Thing, and — do I — do I know you?”
“No, no, no. We ain’t met. I’m Tony T.” He extended a big mitt and shook my hand with vigor, smiling all the while.
“What — ah — Tony — what are you up to here?”
“Tony-Tee,” he said. “It’s gotta be the whole thing, Tony T.”
“Tony T,” I said, “let me ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“What the fuck are you up to here?”
“I’m — ah — I’m just pumpin’ out the bilge. You got a little leak problem here on this launch.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ve had that little leak problem ever since I bought the damned thing. I think I was snookered.”
“Hey, listen. We all make mistakes — and all boats leak. But we’re gonna slow it down to the point where you don’t even notice it.”
“We are?”
“Hey — I am. Don’t worry about it, Boss, I’ll take care of it.”
“‘Boss’?”
I looked at him, and I thought about questioning boss-and-employee as a description of the nature of our relationship. Specifically, I thought about asking him how much he was expecting me to pay him, but he went back to his work with such relish that I decided for the moment to accept boss as an honorific and the work as a gift.
“We’re gonna be usin’ this one exclusively for freight,” he said. “We’re bringin’ in another boat for the customers.”
“We are?”
“Yeah. I’ll be making a run every hour on the hour. Every half hour on weekends. And on a as-needed basis. That’s what Lou said.”
“Ahhh, Lou,” I said, and boss slid a little further toward metaphor, at least as it applied to me. I stretched, looked up, and saw the dredge coming our way.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
Tony T looked up. “Hey!” he said. “It’s about time! That’s a guy I hired in town, Dexter somebody.”
“Dexter Burke.”
“Yeah. Lou told me to hire him. He calls him Dexter Jerk. If you say it right, the guy don’t even notice.”
“You’re both working for Lou?”
“Not me. I’m just here for a vacation — ”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course. You’re pumping the launch to keep your mind off business, right?”
“Yeah. Lou told me about it.”
“But Dexter is working for Lou?”
“Yeah. He’s carryin’ a tank of water on that god-awful shitbox he’s drivin’, and he’s gettin’ a crew together to build — is it a sister?”
“A cistern.”
“You got it. And he’s gonna use the dredge to suck your cellar dry, and — ” He broke off suddenly, threw his arm around my neck in a headlock and rubbed his knuckles on my head, playfully. “Looka dere, looka dere, looka dere! Oooh-baby-baby! Look at what he’s towin’ behind that dredge. That’s my baby.”
She had been, once upon a time, my baby. She was a 1938 Chris-Craft triple-cockpit barrel-back mahogany runabout with seats for six — but maybe my baby wasn’t the baby he meant when he said “That’s my baby,” because perched on the mahogany, sunning herself, striking a bathing-beauty pose, was a hood’s girlfriend, very much like the bad girls of my high-school days — sexy, sassy, and cynical — except that she was, like Tony T, about sixty years old.
[to be continued]
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