Still Soft With Sleep (A Novel based on a true story) - Part One: Six Months, Ch. 3
by Vincenzo Barney
We conclude the second week of the second round of PILCROW’s Serialized Novel Contest. Over the week and a half, we’ll serialize the excerpts of our remaining Finalist’s unpublished novel, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack. Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner $1,000.
Our Finalists are:
Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds
Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney
Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper
While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.
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Vincenzo Barney is a Vanity Fair contributor. He wrote Still Soft With Sleep for his senior thesis at Bennington in 2018. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and Augusta Britt, a story he broke for Vanity Fair last year.
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The food was cooked and we filed into the kitchen of the “cottage,” about forty people or so. Caleb announced himself and smiled at Elvis ear to ear, pointing at me saying, “I can’t believe they let this guy in.” Caleb’s eyes were always in crescents, even when he wasn’t stoned, which he probably was. He wore a velvet suit and pocket square, looking like a blonde Don Draper with his square jaw and his hair combed back, but with enough volume in the hair that he looked more like if James Dean had made it out of adolescence and into business with the style of the five-o’clock shadow.
We sat at the table with a man who looked like Tom Cruise’s character Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. I realized later it was Chris’s father, Frank McConnel whose brother had bankrupted the Dodgers. Elvis’s brother kept asking him questions about Ireland and England and you could tell how much money he was worth because he took as much time as he felt like before answering questions in one syllable, “Yeah” or “No” or “Sure.”
After a few painful rounds of this, a full sentence mercifully emerged to one of Jamie’s questions.
“Did you see any futbol games when you were in England this year?”
“I saw Chelsea and Arsenal.”
“You saw Chelsea play Arsenal?” Jamie asked excitedly. “That was one of the best games of the year. Man, I wish I could have gone to that.”
Frank ignored Jamie and called over to his other son who had grilled the swordfish:
“Hampton.”
“Yeah Dad.”
“Good job buddy on the swordfish.”
“Thanks Dad.”
“Good stuff.”
Jamie sat trying to reestablish eye-contact with Frank who was looking down at his plate.
Frank finally spoke. “Caleb.”
“Yeah Frank,” Caleb called across the way.
“You’re all alone over there.” By the impressive power of his observation, Frank had seen what was true: Caleb was indeed sitting by himself.
“That’s because I want no distractions,” said Caleb.
A lengthy pause. “Hah. No distractions,” said Frank.
“Yeah. No distractions while I eat this swordfish, Frank. Can’t risk it.”
“That’s funny Caleb.” Wealthy pause. “Good stuff.” Pause. “Hear that Hampton?”
“Yeah dad.”
“No distractions. Hah.”
“No distractions, dad.”
“Good stuff.”
“Good stuff, dad.”
He sat chewing for awhile and then looked back up, and stared nowhere over Jamie’s shoulder.
“No. I saw Chelsea and Arsenal play separately. Chelsea-Tottenham, Arsenal-Manchester.”
The swordfish was good, even though all Hampton did was throw it on the grill. Didn’t cut it, didn’t marinate it – just didn’t burn it. I even saw his mother relieve him of the flipping duties halfway through, so I’m not sure how much credit he deserves for standing in proximity to the food while it cooked, but he got it.
After dinner everyone filtered back into the kitchen and living room, and I stood around the kitchen table with Elvis’s sisters and their friends, drinking and picking appetizers off circulating plates. His sister Laura was walking around the room taking polaroids. There were some halfbeautiful women there, beautiful not because of anything inner or genetic or deeper than all of that, but because they were bland and wealthy enough to mask themselves with that wealthy-beautiful look, mold themselves to the dress and makeup the eye is trained to be attracted to on Instagram. They were all in the mid to late 20s, and had passed just barely that zone of youth Elvis and I were still safely inside of. They wanted us and they wanted to be as young as us again. Elvis and I passed a half hour skirting around the periphery, never penetrating deeper into the vapid, soulless pageantry, rolling eyes and making funny faces at each other across the way.
Then Chris walked by us looking for something and I touched his arm.
“Hey man, is that your boat moored off the beach?” I meant the yacht Elvis and I had touched.
He didn’t look at me as he passed. “Nah, but whoever’s it is is b-a-l-l-i-n-g-ing.”
“Uh huh.”
“Got something I wanna show you and your butt buddy in a bit.”
“Sorry?”
“It’ll blow your tits off.”
“Cool.”
I turned back and grabbed another beer, there not being much else to do. I was scrolling mindlessly through my phone when Caleb came up to me, pointing at my shattered screen.
“Have you ever considered getting a new phone?”
“Um, no, not really.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Take a look at mine. This has the best digital phone camera on the market, and I only pay 80 dollars a month for it. Take a look at the camera. I take all my promotional photos with it.”
I pointed it at the party.
“Certainly looks good. But what happens to the quality,” pointing it at Chris, “when you zoom in...? Eesh.”
Caleb looked at me seriously. “You deserve this phone.” Then he paused, holding my eye and asked, “Who’s that on your background, She’s hot.”
“Oh, She’s just a friend.” I locked the screen and put it in my pocket.
Laura came up to us, taking a polaroid, and then said:
“Come outside, Chris is giving his birthday speech.”
“His birthday speech? Boy George,” I said.
“Oh sure, the sheer size of it!”
The McConnel’s had rendered the porch nearly pitch-black, turning off all the lights so that baby-faced Chris could speak to us on some wooden podium or chair beneath a floodlight. A woman’s arm reached out of the dark to hand Chris the glass of white wine he had handed her as he had steadied his half-doughed girth onto the chair. In his ill-fitting low voice he began.
“Thank you Sandra. I just want to start by saying, really mom? Only 48 people?” He held for laughs. “No, I’m kidding. I want to thank all of you for coming – well, some of you.” He held again. “No, I’m only kidding… Kind of. No, no, to be honest, I am really thankful for my friends and my family. I don’t know where I’d be without some of you, or how I would have made it to 27…”
“Probably just by not dying, right?” Elvis whispered to me.
I laughed.
From behind us in the dark, a hand slowly placed a vape pen in front of our faces. We both flinched in fear. A few heads turned to locate the disturbance, but the darkness hid us. It was Caleb, standing quietly behind us. Elvis and I hit the latest in Californian innovation, “Just to test that it was working properly,” Caleb had urged. Chris finished his speech and Caleb put his arms around us. “Chris wants to show you something. Gonna blow your cocks off.”
“What’s all this about blowing cocks and tits off?”
“You’ll find out.”
Caleb led us through the crowd and to Chris, fielding congratulations on his speech.
“Ah, you too. Thought you guys’d run off for a quickie.” His jokes were reaches all of them, mistimed insinuations. “Come with me. Are your cocks strapped on?”
“Sure.”
He brought us into his bedroom and took a box out from under his bed. I couldn’t believe how plain and devoid of personality his bedroom was. He fetched some keys and unlocked the box. And pulled a gun from it.
“What’s that?” asked Elvis.
“It’s .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and you gotta ask yourself a question. Are you feeling lucky?” He tossed it to Elvis.
“Jesus man! What the fuck.”
“Chill bro it’s not loaded. Not yet.”
“Pretty sick, huh?” said Caleb. “It’s from Dirty Harry.”
“Yeah but not the regular .44 Magnum. This is the Auto Mag .44 AMP from Sudden Impact. Fucking huge.”
“Big fan of the series, huh?” I asked. Elvis tried his best not to even hold the gun and Caleb took it from him and handed it over to Chris. Chris opened the cylinder and slid the bullets into their chambers.
“Time for fireworks,” Chris smiled. He led us into the backyard away from the crowds and into a clearing in the woods. I could feel how uncomfortable Elvis was. Could feel him looking to me to intercede.
“They’re gonna start anytime soon?” Caleb asked.
“Yeah, cept my mom’s such a retarded bitch she’s probably forgotten.” He laughed. “Kidding. Love her.”
The first birthday firework whirred into the sky and Chris hurriedly lifted the pistol. The firework exploded and several others shot up into the sky and Chris shot the pistol randomly and celebratorily into the air as they exploded. The sound was deafening and Elvis and I plugged our ears.
“You know that’s really fucking stupid right? Bullets come down,” I said when he was done.
“Chill dude. We’re on Chappy. They might hit a fish out in the water. I do this all the time.”
Elvis and I stole two of the most expensive bottles of wine in the dark and kayaked back over the harbor.
“What a fucking loser that guy is,” said Elvis. “That’s why I can’t stand these people, man.”
We hugged the shore in the moonlight, and I told Elvis I wished I had met his father.
“You know, all this wealth is new in my family. On both sides. My dad, he didn’t really like any of this. I mean, he did, he liked some of it, like his own house. But that kind of party wasn’t his scene. He hated that stuff. He hated the Charlotte Inn and getting dressed up to go out to dinner. And guys like Frank McConnel. You know? He wasn’t my dad’s speed. He hated the name Mayflower. It was my mom’s idea to name it. He didn’t want to. And I’m trying to keep that going, trying to make my siblings remember all that about him.”
“That’s because he earned it, and he was a real guy before.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“His father was a janitor in Park Slope, right?”
“Yeah, got on some boat from Ireland when he was a teenager… nuts. Can you imagine doing that?”
“No way. I had trouble enough getting on this kayak the first time.”
“You know, this whole thing with my dad and your girlfriend… It doesn’t seem real.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
“When it all happens so suddenly, you know? I don’t know… You know it, but it takes a long time for it to settle in. For It and your head to get used to each other. I don’t know. I guess It couldn’t really happen any slower. But that could be that difference between knowing and understanding – just time, you know?”
“Yeah. But, sometimes the longer it goes on the more absurd it feels.”
“Yeah. That’s true.”
The water smelled clean.
“You know, I was listening to Cat Stevens lately…” he started.
“Cat man, what a beast. We both were.”
“Yeah. But by myself back in the city. You know ‘Father and Son?’”
“Yeah, course.”
“What’s interesting in that song is that when Cat sings, ‘And I know, that I have to go away,’ it’s actually the son saying that to the father. I always thought it was the father saying it to the son, but it’s the son. It’s not just the father who has to leave, it’s the son who has to make the decision too, even though it’s kinda already decided for him. I just realized that the other day.”
We went past all the boats and sailboats and yachts anchored in the harbor, and looked in all the windows at the people watching TV on their couches, eating, our kayak low in the water. There were Chelsea futbol highlights on one of the TVs and Elvis paused to watch them through the window. He cheered loudly at a goal and we made a getaway as the heads in the boat turned out towards us in the darkness and then, as we watched a harbor patrol flash its red lights and disappear behind the rounded edge of the beach that we were hugging, I felt about to cry for Elvis about his dad. But it felt disloyal to do that without him crying first, and besides, the tears could not come. I wasn’t aligned for tears anymore so I just did some silent halfcry like a stunted inhale behind him in the kayak, and above the beach and in the clouds and fog over Edgartown there was a red light rising and softing.
“You think that’s a fire?” I asked the back of his head.
“No, it’s just store lights or something.”
But when we got free of the beach and could see into Edgartown where people waited for the Chappy Ferry, we saw a crowd and a flashing ambulance going across. Elvis suddenly saw his sisters and brother waiting for the next ferry on the Chappy side. We kayaked over and called to them and they said that when they got there a woman was unmoving on the ground and she had put her in an ambulance.
Elvis and I tensed, thinking of Chris’s gun.
“She ok? The woman?” asked Elvis.
“Oh sure, just got drunk or something. She’s alive if that’s what you mean. So, see you guys at the boathouse tonight, right?”
“Oh sure,” I said.
There was already a boat at Elvis’s by the time we floated up. A twenty foot center-console with outboard engine and about nine or ten people drinking outside the boathouse, including Chris, somehow already back from his own party and calling all of his friends “my negro,” which we could hear from the water. One degree of separation from the word he desperately wanted to be saying and probably did in more intimate settings.
Elvis and I pulled our kayak in somewhat defeatedly to shore. I liked seeing a boat along Elvis’s dock, but not Chris’s.
Before long another center-console showed up and someone got out of it with a Bud Light and came running up to Elvis.
“Elvis!”
“Hey, Runnsler.”
“How the hell are yuh! Haven’t seen you in years.” He shook his hand and held it, keeping Elvis’s hand in a light throb.
“Yeah, last summer at the 4th.”
“Yeah, it’s been years. How old are you now?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Over Twenty-one?”
“Yeah. Twenty-two.”
“Good stuff. You still at UVM?”
“Yeah.”
I went to correct him but Elvis smiled at me and I didn’t say anything.
“This is my friend Adam. He goes to school with me too.”
He let go of Elvis’s hand and shook mine.
“Runnsler, nice to meet you. Short for Runnsilier. So, I hear you go to school up in Burlington with Elvis.”
“Yup. Burlington.”
“UVM.”
“That’s another way of putting it.”
“Uvm.”
“Sorry?”
“Uvm,” he said again, pronouncing the letters UVM together as a word. “That’s what you call it up there, don’t ya?”
“Oh yeah. Uvm. Sure.”
“Great school. I had some drinking buddies from up there. We’ve got this tattoo here under the arm about it.”
“Good stuff. Where’d you go to school?” I asked.
“Yeah, good stuff, good stuff. Dartmouth,” he said.
“Oh cool. My grandparents live a little outside of there.”
“Yeah? Whereabouts? Those houses in Hanover are beautiful.”
“No, not in Hanover actually, but right outside. In Canaan.”
“Canaan? Where’s that?”
“It’s like right next to Lebanon and, um, they live on a lake called Goose Pond.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna get a drink. Christ Elvis, you’re so big now. My little brother is huge. Have you seen him? George? That’s my little brother. Taller’n me. He’s going to Georgetown next year with your brother, right? I told your brother if he can send me nudes of George I’ll pay him 100 dollars for ‘em. Good stuff. He’s gonna get trashed up there. You seen him?”
Elvis and I sat on the corner of the dock where the water broke. The waves were lapping over these little jellyfish, which you could only see when a big enough lap broke and shook an electric blue light out of them.
“That’s probably how they die,” Elvis said.
“By glowing.”
Another boat pulled up, another twenty-footer, a person for every foot. Expensive cargo. Caleb got off, all drunken-high smiles and helped the women onto the dock.
“Jesus. Look at how they stuffed ‘em on. They’re lucky nothing happened coming over.”
“Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world,” Elvis said, his eyes still on the jellyfish.
“Not Caleb though.”
“No, Caleb’s a beast. Look, Adam,” Elvis pointed down at the water, “if you look long enough you can see the translucent shape in the water.”
I turned to look at the jellyfish but a guy jumped loudly off the boat, runwalking down the dock toward us with his phone up to his ear, grinning with his mouth open and his jaw shaking, eyes vacant and nose twitching. Coke.
“He’s got the boogle jaw for sure.”
“It’s like slack jaw, but with more slack. Look at that thing moving, it’s gonna come unhinged!”
“Look at his fucking tie.”
It was pink with little yellow and green squares on it.
“That is gross.”
“I bet you we could fineagle some coke out of him though,” I said.
“Could do,” Elvis said. “Could very well do bru.”
They had all come from the yacht club and were dressed as you’d expect them. Caleb came up to us there on the dock with a woman on his arm who gave us only two-thirds of her face before leaving to dance in the boathouse. We stood up and watched her go.
“Bruv, she is banging Caleb,” Elvis said. “How’d you smuggle her across?”
“Don’t touch.”
“Oh man.”
“No, I mean it. Don’t touch unless you want the herps.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, you gotta strap up if you wanna take her down.”
“Jesus man,” I said.
“You got any of that pen from last night?” Elvis asked.
“Bruh, obviously. Put it in.” He leaned closer to Elvis and said in a high, sultry voice, “and then wait for it to vibrate in your mouth.” Elvis let out a choked cloud of laughter.
“And what flavor is this one, Caleb?” I asked.
“This one is for getting lit. I have four types: one for sleeping, one for chilling, one for getting lit, and one that will make you rock hard. I only packed the lit one though. Oh, and this one that’s lemon flavored.” He pulled another vape pen from his pocket. “It does a little of each, and a lot of neither. I also have some fire Molly if you guys want any.”
“Nah man, I’m good off the Molly. This lemon pen is sick though,” Elvis said.
“Dude, this pen is like if Apple got into the vape game. This thing is huge in LA. In ten years, women and housewives are gonna be coming home from work and they’re gonna hit this. Gone are the days of red wine to unwind. Gone. It’s an inevitability.”
Caleb went inside and Elvis disappeared pretty soon afterwards, saying he had work the next morning. I had forgotten that he had gotten a job at a beer brewery in town before we’d left for the city, around the time I had gotten the one at the Second Hand Store.
“You don’t have to get up til 12,” I said. “I’ve got work tomorrow at 9.”
“I don’t know man, I just don’t like these people.”
“Let’s just get trashed like last night. Then it doesn’t matter who we’re with. We’ll play cups and stick it to them again.”
“Maybe I’ll come down later. I have to talk to ‘Stana. She took off for LA this morning without telling me, and she might not come back to Londonberry next term.”
“Alright L, just come back down after.”
“Look man. I don’t like these people.”
“Neither do I, but it’s where the party is.”
After some black, vacant length I found myself steeped in a debate about John McCain with Runnsler out on the dock. How did I get there?
As 4 am rolled around I again found myself transplanted, sitting with Caleb on the second floor porch of the house, the party having faded and only a few suited stragglers left, including the guy with the boogle jaw who kept loping up and down the stairs, asking us if we wanted to go all night but not sharing any boogle to do so.
“Where’s Chris?” Caleb asked.
“He’s down there with that chick in the boathouse. He’s plowing dude,” booglejaw said.
“Hah, he’s plowing dude. Bruh, he’s totally plowing right now dude.” Caleb laughed with his eyes closed.
“Let’s go all night guys. Come on Cay.”
“You gotta share some of what’s coming out of your nose if you wanna do that,” Caleb said.
“What do you mean?”
“Bruh. Get a fucking kleenex.”
“Who is Chris with?” I asked.
“That girl you were trying to get with,” Caleb said.
“Sandra?”
“Yeah dude. What happened, you almost had her tonight,” Caleb said.
“I know. Well, we were just talking, I wasn’t trying anything. She’s funny.”
“She gives chill head bruh.”
The boogle guy put his phone to his head and rifled off a few yes’s and then screamed “No no no!” several times. All night he had been putting his phone to his head in random intervals or in the middle of dancing or laughing at someone like a complete lunatic, speaking for a second and then never saying goodbye or looking at his phone when he hung up. He may very well have been on a six-hour phone call for all I could tell.
“Will you talk somewhere else man? We’re getting down to this song.”
“What Caleb?”
“Your phone man.”
“You can stay if you share the boogle,” I said.
“What’s boogle?”
“It’s what you’re on bru.”
“Let’s do some brugle,” laughed Caleb.
“What’s brugle?” the guy asked.
“Enough talk, let’s just chill to this song,” Caleb said.
We probably could’ve used the coke, gesturing halfdead with our hands at the pitch black between the two columns of Elvis’s porch, our heads tucked into our chests, pointing and signing in presleep rhythm at the perfect square of black framed between the twin columns:
Because I’m still in love with You
I wanna see You dance again
Because I’m still in love with You
And later:
If You should ever leave me
Though life would still go on believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would livin’ do me
God only knows what I’d be without You
God only knows what I’d be without You
Then we heard a familiar medley: “Yes? YES? YES!? Nonono!” with quick transition to a maniacal laugh.
“What kinda data plan does this fucker have?”
“Massive. Absolutely massive.”
“Caleb man, we have an extra bed.” I meant the blow-up mattress, which suddenly seemed viable to me. “There’s no way you can drive home tonight.”
“Bed sounds nice man.” He was slumping down deeper into that drunken exhaustion halfsleep of 5 ams.
“I’m gonna go in,” I said.
“Bruh, we’re chilling… Look at us bruh. Just two cool guys. Just chilling. It’s all we’re doing.”
Light was coming back to the Earth and I saw the door of the boathouse open and Chris and Sandra walk out, fully clothed. No way anything had happened. I waited for Sandra to get into the house before I got Caleb to go to sleep on the right angle couch by Elvis’s brother Jamie, head to head like two little kids, leaving the boogle guy to lap up all the lies coming out of Chris’s mouth.
I got into Elvis’s mattress after watching Chris’s boat float from the dock silently in the pink-into-orange of firstlight and Elvis said, “5:30, are you kidding me bru?” He had stayed up all night waiting for me.
I laughed and got into my boxers under the blanket. The room was freezing so I clung to the blanket while he told me in words coming straight out of whatever had just been his sleeping:
“I think I had an epiphany man. I had this crazy vision while I was halfway asleep,” he said.
“What was it?”
“I can’t say it in words. Tomorrow I’ll tell you.”
“No, you’ll forget it tomorrow. Try now. You won’t have the words tomorrow.”
“I’ve been trying to for twenty-two years man.”
“Just try.”
He didn’t say anything for a long while. Then I heard his mouth open in the darkness.
“It’s these colors of blue and orange, and, like, a path. I remember seeing it in my car seat, closing my eyes under the sunlight coming through the windows, and always seeing this shape back then, or these patterns of shapes, blue and orange with my eyes closed. And I was thinking, I remember seeing this little baby on the subway, maybe 2 years old - actually I’ve seen this a lot - and the kid was crying and his parents gave him one of their phones and he was looking through it, like gonna take a photo or whatever, and he was seeing the whole world through a phone and he just instantly calmed down and held it sideways to get a wider angle so perfectly like an adult, like it was so natural for him to hold a phone and look through it, staring into it like it was a pacifier. And he’s looking at his dad’s shirt through the camera, and this little band came onto the subway car, just a cello and violin. And I’m standing there trying to listen to Bron-Yr-Aur on my phone, it had a lot of importance to me after my dad died, and I was waiting the whole train ride to hear it because I had no WiFi and now I finally have WiFi and I’m turning up the volume so loud that I can’t hear these guys, and the violinist is almost elbowing me in the face he’s playing so crazy and putting so much into it, and I’m looking around and all these people are standing there and sitting there in the orange seats looking so blank and vague at their screens, or just looking at nothing with their own headphones in, not even looking inwards at themselves, just traveling through this little tunnel with the blue sparks of the rail flying up, smelling everyone and that’s it, that’s their only connection with these people, smelling everyone’s smell. Not looking, not talking, trying not to touch anyone, and some of them even threw the band a dollar, without even looking at them, or listening to them and, I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I was wondering how my face compared to these blank people with their headphones in and, you know, no one even met my eye, no one was looking anywhere… and these poor guys playing are all so raggedy looking and a little smelly, and there was some homeless guy passed out full on one of the seats and this train was crowded, and the homeless guy was there probably to just escape the heat and be in the AC because it was July, and, I don’t know… and no one in my family, none of my friends in the city, they never take the train… I don’t know. And I didn’t throw the band any money. Just thought of how my face looked.”
“I think I get it,” I said.
“Yeah. I don’t know. I guess I just, whatever, have this bubble around me, because of where I was born, how I was raised, and I hate it, and I have a real choice to just, I don’t know, just fly somewhere far away and know no one for a while and leave it all and have a house that you can feel the history in, and the soul in it. And, I don’t know, the freedom of that almost, that guy sleeping across the subway seat. I don’t know. I just couldn’t face those people tonight. I hate all of them. They’re not real.”
Elvis woke me up at 9:07 without a single dream I could remember, just the little afterflutters of one, confused as to why my eyes were open so soon and why it had had to vanish. I was still hammered and seven minutes late for work. I always thought it a joke when people said they woke up still drunk, but it’s not. Though I did find it funny.
There was a strange sound coming from the bathroom toilet but I didn’t stop to see what it was and headed down the stairs. Rounding the third floor I saw Elvis’s grandfather mopping up all this water falling out of the ceiling in the room below the bathroom. Elvis always blew his nose and threw it in the toilet and never flushed it, and evidently someone that morning had flushed the toilet and it clogged and not knowing how to use a plunger, it overflowed and was leaking through the ceiling.
Being too disoriented to fully run, I managed to runwalk to the ferry in under a minute.
The harbor I piloted the ferry over each day was a seatop of Debussian wavechords, like pianoing waves gliding across the opening of a scored film. I couldn’t wait to see it.
“Where’s Brock?”
Jill looked at me a little dumbfounded. “He’s not here, Adam.”
“Who’s gonna captain?”
“Didn’t you hear?”
“Ah well, it was about time I was promoted. We all knew Brock was losing his touch.” But Jill didn’t laugh.
“The girl who was killed last night was Rosie.”
“Who?”
“The girl camping in Chappaquidick. You met her the other day.” Then Jill put her head in her hands. “Adam.”
The sea was not rough that day but there was a strong wind coming across the harbor from the east blowing the small waves over into their toppled white. The wind deepened the color of the water and the clouds banked the sun in such a manner that its light did not glitter off the water but looked dark and wet. The beauty of bright dry sunlight in the water is that it does not look wet but glassed and precise. So the clouds were wet and this put a glare into the sunlight and made it moody and painterly and the clouds were so threadbare and moved so fast that all day we were darkened and opened into the light in the course of a few seconds. I felt the winter, the fogged snowy crossings in the night that Brock told me about, not seeing the landing until you were upon it and straightening out with only a few holy seconds to glide it in and hit the front rutter. Then the sun would open upon us and I felt the sweat on the sides of my body and the overlit attention of the summer. The sun too encompassing, the body too naked. Too naked, too lit. At the mouth of the harbor a bright white sheet of glare lay trapped and hemmed in by dark water and the yachts bobbed in it. I could see Chris’s father’s yacht, posed with towering innocence against the treeline of Chappadquidick.
I piloted the boat in the southeast wind and ebb. It was my first time left alone at the wheel. It was the smaller ferry with 20,000 pounds of ballast and a slight hull. This made it flush and track better in the waves and currents, but for this reason too it didn’t like to stop and I had the feeling each time landing that I was speeding in too fast but had to overcome this fear and let my muscles learn to calm and trust the front rutter to slow us in time. I backed off earlier than I had to and held the tension of fear against the calm and this made each trip an event, a potential of disaster that I had to steward from violence. Visions of the ferry going sideways and not being able to right it and all the tension of the wealthy eyes in the harbor marking my failure, but I handled it and by the end I could feel the calming ache of new muscle memory breaking through me and the wind whistling through the cracks of the glass wheelhouse was like a mother’s bedtime voice. I was in imitation of Brock and in my attempted overlap I felt him as if I was in a state of tracery scrawling over his trajectory and his talent for the thing.
There is a lot of anticipation involved in driving a boat. You are reading the waves at least thirty feet out at a time, come pouring and developing their size and shape in this zone. With such a heavy ferry you have to anticipate. First it is guesswork, first finding your angle, slowing in the turn and hitting the front rutter and feeling how this all adds together. It is like following footprints in the snow but having to marry the momentum of the water and the wind and your own inertia to curve perfectly into the footprint three steps ahead. You have to previsualize it and react in the moment to achieve the vision.
“How long is Brock going to be out?”
“Well his daughter’s dead Adam,” she said, looking out at the packed, throbbed, bunched bright harbor over my shoulder. “And they don’t know who did it.”
“Can’t they trace the trajectory of the bullet? I mean, can’t they calculate its direction and find him?”
She looked off now toward Chappaquiddick where the bullet had come from, and I sought Chris’s house through the trees and harborfronts drawing its curtain over it as I landed the boat a little late on the front rutter and the cars jostled.
“You’re doing a good job,” Jill said, and the upwardness of her gaze helped calm me. It helped me know how to pilot. She was a woman who wanted to look up into a man’s face so I would give it to her.
Only as I pulled away did the curtain open itself and show Chris’s house, spreading open behind my back. And as I started each crossing I would begin by seeing it in the corner of my left eye, and disappear behind the changing landscape as I drew closer to it.
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