Salty Sky Read online

  The sun and booze caught up with Joe. The trainers were somewhere behind him. He only noticed them the last hour when one reached into the beer bucket.

  As they left the bar, Joe and Tony said good-night to two of the trainers. Gino was absent. Joe told them he was flying them out in the morning and for them to tell his nephew when he showed up.

  Onboard Framed, Joe ate four Chips Ahoy! cookies, downed a glass of milk, and called it a day. He looked forward to his kiss just before he awoke.

  13

  THE GUYS RELOADED beers and sat in the Adirondacks. Widespread Panic played on the Jawbone. A burner heated leftover stew. Cale unloaded the Whaler while Jimmy slept on the dock, his head resting on his front paws.

  When he’d finished unloading, Cale iced his right hand in a cooler and drank a Gatorade with his left. The dock was mostly dark. He hoped the others wouldn’t notice the improvised physical therapy. He wasn’t sure why, but he hadn’t mentioned the fisticuffs. He hoped the incident was simply in the past, although he knew hope wasn’t a good strategy.

  These things had a way of not staying in the past. Wasn’t he a bit long in the tooth for such behavior? Would his personal umbrella insurance cover a lawsuit? He imagined his daughters’ mothering eyes if they heard old Gramps had gotten into a fistfight (again). The mental image of their expressions surprised him and brought out a laugh, which he figured was better than crying.

  For some reason, an old fight flashed through his brain. It was in New Orleans during a bowl game. They’d won. Maybe next season a national title. He played well. Felt good. The coaches turned a blind eye to the hotel exodus, and he made plans to catch the guys on Bourbon Street, but first he had a date with Maggie at Pat O’Brien’s.

  As they entered the crowded courtyard, two alumni gave up their wrought-iron two-top to him and Maggie in exchange for handshakes and a photo op. When he was handed a Hurricane, Cale copped James Bond’s line, “The best drink of the day is just before the first.” (At the time, that sounded cool, but now he appreciated the insight.) He clinked his oversized glass against Maggie’s water goblet.

  The tropical vegetation was vividly green for January. Maggie wore jeans, a tank top, and a white cardigan. He wore the team’s travel outfit: khakis, a golf shirt, and a sweater with the university’s mascot stitched onto the breast. Fans in gold, blue, and green took more pictures with him as they left. In a moment of peace, she told him she was ten weeks pregnant.

  Surprising himself, he was stoked. The preamble was over; life started now. That national championship run was forgotten, getting a degree was forgotten. Her smile at his reaction lit the table.

  She unleashed daydreams. Where they’d live. How they’d pay for things. What the baby boy would look like. She was sure it was a boy until the ultrasound fifteen weeks later. (Stress a and boy—wrong and wrong.) Cale took the straw from his hurricane and bit it in half, slipped it into itself to form a circle. He grabbed Maggie’s hand. “I’m sorry I haven’t asked your parents’ permission, and I’m not sure what I’ll tell Father Malloy, but Maggie, will you marry me?” There were few times when he’d gotten life exactly right. That was one.

  “Yes.” Kiss.

  He didn’t notice the place filling with orange-and-blue fans. Didn’t remember even to order a new drink. Eventually, he did use the restroom. As he returned, he saw two guys in orange standing beside Maggie. A third sat in his seat. Maggie’s glow was undimmed and there was a little mischief in her eyes.

  “Excuse me, mind if I grab my seat back?”

  “No, this seat works for me. Go back to the grain fields. We’ll take good care of this little lady. She looks pricey, but I’m sure we can afford her.” The talker was out of college but not by much—maybe a law student or a bank analyst. A little kindle caught fire in Maggie’s eyes.

  Cale responded, “Fellas, we appreciate you visiting, but it’s time y’all left our table.”

  “Oh, we’re good, Hoss. I’ll even buy your drink. Just mosey on now. I’m sure your coach is worried about you.”

  “Cale, honey, let’s just go. It’s late anyway. I’m sure your coach is worried. With these three strapping young adversaries, I’m worried about you too.” Fake drawl, grin, needle in his adversary’s pride. Troublesome vixen, she was trying to get them out of trouble but not willing to walk away in full defeat.

  “Well, no, Maggie. Coach thinks I’m asleep, and I like our table. Guys, seriously, this has been great fun, but time to move on.”

  “Or what? You hit me, you’ll have to hit these guys too. Then some of the other guys from inside. Then, whether you’re standing or not, the cops will arrest you, and your football career is done. Coleman, we all saw SportsCenter reports of when you were arrested last year for fighting. This one gets you packed off that lily-white campus. No football. No scholarship. No degree, if you were actually planning on getting one. So, Hoss, we’re not that worried. So go on out, and we’ll entertain your friend. Maggie, right?” The soliloquy and spotty reasoning made Cale conclude they were law students.

  All three orange guys stood. Maggie got up and backed away. She must have known that if she’d gotten bounced around in the altercation, Cale’s rage wouldn’t stop even when their heads hit the brick patio pavers. The guy talking had his head tilted so much his ear almost touched his shoulder. Was that supposed to be intimidating? A show of intellect? What was he trying to convey? His neon orange rugby shirt was stained from a long tailgate. The other two smirked, confident in themselves, their friends, or how much Cale was worried about playing football.

  Bad calculus. Fist to the nose of guy on left. Crack, blood, down. Elbow to the talker in the middle. Down. Guy on the right cracked Cale’s right temple. That was a surprise. He recovered and unloaded a right into the man’s left shoulder. The blow knocked the man off balance. Cale reloaded and dropped another right to the left side of his jaw.

  When the fight was over, he was arrested. There were journalists and photographers. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and he sat on the curb while drunk orange-and-blue fans taunted him.

  But Maggie kissed him. “That was a good one to go out on, big papa. Now no more from here on.”

  Oh, if that had only been true. Cale thought, I’ve tried, Maggie. You know I have tried.

  Man, in the memory, she looked too happy. “The arresting officer says you’re heading to central lockup. They’ll set bail in the morning. I’ll let your coaches know before the media finds out and meet you there in a few hours to bail you out. I love you.”

  Central lockup was cold, foul smelling. There was a little throw-up, a little urine, a lot of body odor. The first cell held over a hundred people. There was a line to use the pay phone. Were there still pay phones in jail, or could you use your cell? The prisoners were ninety percent black, ninety-five percent drunk. He was shuffled from cell to cell, with no obvious reason for the location changes. They served grits and hard boiled eggs for breakfast. He never got the orange jumpsuit.

  Memory over, no smiling Maggie to tease him this time. Back in the moment, stars were everywhere. The wind picking up. There were no mosquitoes, but a few no-see-ums.

  His phone vibrated—a text from Maggie: “Stop lap dance—put down beer—check weather.” All right, it wasn’t really a text from Maggie but a warning text from a weather service he’d registered with. Arlene had hooked left. Category 2. Projected downgrade to tropical storm when hitting land. Expected landfall, North Carolina coast. Rain to start by dawn. Winds arriving by noon.

  Cale texted back, “Thx. Beer down, will prepare house when lap dance over! Send guys in car Mon, see you Tues—if all OK. Love you. Tell girls sorry I’ll be late.” The no-reply texting service bounced back a minute later. He wasn’t sure why he did that. Maggie died before texting took over the world.

  He started the storm prep process, grabbing extra lines to secure the boat. Arlene showed prescient timing: The King Air was on the tarmac, its normal hangar closed for the we
ek for floor resealing. He left a voice mail at the FBO to see whether they could move it to a different hangar. He was sure it was too late unless other owners had flown inland.

  There was much work to be done to put the house in the best position to weather the storm. He needed to close the storm shutters, secure the kitchen, and lash down the outdoor furniture. The house would survive; it always did. It was high enough to avoid flooding. The hip roof deflected the wind. A barrier island and the marsh protected it. Maybe there would be some missing shingles or a pine tree would fall inconsiderately, but there’d be nothing too severe. He wasn’t sure about the plane or the boat and tried to be philosophical, thinking his insurance company couldn’t make money on him every year.

  He moved the potted plants from the front porch. He and Jimmy bumped into each other repeatedly. The moving from place to place was messing up Jimmy’s sleeping patterns. A minivan taxi pulled into the driveway, and Blake stepped out. That was an inaccurate description. Blake fell out into a stagger with his arm around the girl from the cabin cruiser. Van folded a seat forward and, with another girl, got out of the rear row. The mind-numbing hot blonde from earlier sat in the front seat and paid. She was joking with the driver. The driver laughed and thanked her for the tip. The driver seemed more than a bit smitten.

  Hmm. These working girls lost their ride and were crashing at his house? If the blonde could carry a conversation, she could marry more money than she’d know what to do with. Odd touch of class for a working girl, paying and tipping the driver like that. Cale would have thought she’d only open her wallet to put money in. What a waste.

  “Big maaaan! I didn’t know one song at the club, but my dance moves were still golden. You like this one?” Blake demonstrated. “It never goes out of style. This one is timeless too. Check it out. Look at you, midnight gardener carrying your flowerpots around. That would be a boring movie. Taxi almost hit a deer back there. You say taxi and deer in the same sentence after the word movie, and you can’t help but think De Niro, right? I’m a raging bull! Road is craaaaazy dark. You remember everyone? Good, good.”

  Cale started to respond, but Blake’s mouth started first.

  “Been bragging you have the coldest beer in the state. Only way I could get everyone back here. They said they’ve had extremely cold beer in South Carolina before, but I say South Carolina beer can never be cold enough to taste as good as my man Cale’s beer. Check out those palmetto bugs running on your porch. My ears are ringing, and my mouth is singing. No Louis Armstrong songs; this night is just starting. Whew.” The door smacked closed as they disappeared into the house.

  The girls in the driveway were comparing something on their phones as Van walked over.

  “Lord, he is rolling,” Van said. “What a clown. That jackleg will get you into trouble in a second. You saved him once tonight. I pulled him out of trouble who knows how many times at the club. Hard to keep up with him.”

  “No girls, no energy. But if he gets a whiff of it, you can’t stop him.”

  Van’s face was incredulous and almost weary at the thought of the shared cross they’d shouldered for the weekend. “He has been like white on rice with that one. If he wasn’t marrying somebody else in two weeks, I’d think she was Mrs. Right.”

  “She might not be Mrs. Right, but she is probably Mrs. Right Now. She doesn’t seem too upset about losing her client,” Cale offered.

  Van double blinked. He looked like he’d been punched. He bent forward, laughing, and tried to gain control. He put his left hand on Cale’s shoulder. His head hung down, facing the crushed gravel. Water dripped from his eyes. Cale couldn’t help but start laughing without knowing the punch line.

  The girls looked at the laughers and started walking over, suspicious they were the brunt of the joke. Van pulled it together and whispered, “Big man, what kind of circles do you run in that those are your thoughts? These girls are working girls, and they do work together, but they aren’t that kind of working girls doing that kind of work together.”

  The shorter girl waved and went inside with Van, who hooked his elbow to hers. Cale watched them go inside and heard them go out on the back porch and yell down to the others. He turned to the blonde and felt a little intimidated. Neither her smile nor her sundress, which stopped mid-thigh, was untying his tongue. But he was a diligent host, so, finally, he said, “So you’ll find this so funny. I was just telling Van I thought you were a prostitute. You know, a lady of the evening. And your clients were the old Mafia-type guys from the boat and bar. But he says you don’t even have to pay to have sex with you. Isn’t that the funniest thing ever?”

  Actually, he didn’t say that. But that thought ran through his mind, and Cale capably returned her smile. She finally started the conversation.

  “SORRY WE DIDN’T get introduced before. I’m Ashley Walker. Thank you for what you did with Gino. You know—the big guy in the T-shirt. That was a brave thing to do. He is …” she started and then shook the thought out of her head.

  She studied Cale. His hair was thinning. There were deep sun lines around his eyes, and his skin was a golden tan like hers, not dark olive like Joe’s. His face looked friendly, reminiscent of a successful municipal politician. Confident. At this point in his life, he had probably earned that face. The honesty and the laugh lines—he had a nice smile.

  She noticed his proportion hid his size well. His arms were roped with muscles. He held the cement pots without effort. His T-shirt fit a V-shaped body. She thought maybe he wasn’t being brave with Gino. He might not have had reason to be scared.

  She surprised herself. “I saw you surfing.” Now, embarrassed, she kept talking. “You look busy. Can I help you with something?” Suddenly, she was rambling. “I don’t want another drink, but I know it will be a while before they are ready to go, so I might as well be productive.”

  Ashley paused for half a second, thinking over her use of the word productive. Who said productive on Saturday at midnight? She got her mouth going again. “I got the driver’s cell number, so I can call him directly when we’re ready to leave. He said to give him a half hour heads-up. I gave him a pretty big tip, so I think I can count on him to want another.”

  HER NERVOUSNESS RELAXED Cale. He wondered how in the world she could be nervous unless it was from constantly being pursued. He wondered if he hadn’t spent most of his adulthood following drug dealers whether he would have assumed she was a call girl. He told her about the hurricane.

  Ashley asked, “Do you think I need to call Joe and let him know about the storm? Or will the captain know?”

  “That is a heck of an expensive boat. His captain ought to know.”

  “I don’t even want to know how much that boat cost. It would make me even more convinced Joe was in the Mafia, and I don’t want to think that.” She wanted to change the conversation from Joe and said, “Well, at least it’s good that it’s going to just be a tropical storm.”

  “The wind is less intense, but sometimes the rain is worse because the storm doesn’t move on as fast. I think that was the problem with Katrina. Once it got onto land, it stopped moving but kept raining until the flooding got out of control.”

  “Could something like that happen here?”

  “I don’t think so. The land isn’t as low. No levees that I know of, not as many people. Sometimes the hog farms have their waste lagoons blown out, and that gets into the rivers, and all that bacteria gets built up and comes down and ruins our oysters. There was a real bad storm like that in the mid-nineties.”

  Hmm. Cale wished he hadn’t said “mid-nineties.” She was probably thinking, Oh, I remember reading about that when I was in preschool.

  “Is a waste lagoon what I think it is?”

  “Only for a couple of hundred thousand pigs. You should see the lagoons from the air. Drive to or from the coast on I-40, and there is about a fifteen-mile stretch of road where you catch the scent.”

  “I think I’d rather see it from an airplane th
an smell it on the ground.”

  She helped Cale wedge twenty-four potted plants against a section of shadowbox fence away from the house. They took the front porch furniture into the house. He showed her how to unhinge, shut, and lock down the storm shutters, turning the house into a fortress. They took care of the outdoor items except the Adirondacks and part of the kitchen, which were in use. None of their friends paid any attention to the preparations. He learned about her job and how the trip evolved. The process took an hour.

  Ashley needed to use the restroom. They stepped inside. Cale took the opportunity to straighten things up. Seven guys in a small space put a lot of things out of place. When she got out of the restroom, he noticed her studying his picture wall.

  “Is this your wife and daughters?” she asked, looking at a picture taken on a ski slope ten years prior. This was the first time the subject had arisen.

  He answered yes, and preempted the follow-up. “Maggie, my wife, died not too long after this picture was taken.”

  She glanced at his hand then responded, “I’m sorry.” She caught Cale noticing that she was looking at his hand. Her next statement came out awkwardly. “I guess … I guess … I just assumed you were … still married.”

  He spun the silver ring on his left with this right hand. He did this often. Caught in the unexpectedly awkward moment, he said, “When I’m not paying attention, I still think of myself that way.” Hoping to stay at the surface, he changed topics and pointed to another picture. Three men stood in flight suits, arms outstretched like crosses, their fingertips touching. In the background stood a sequoia with a trunk whose girth exceeded their outstretched arms. As the tallest, Cale was, for symmetry, set in the middle. “Have you ever been to Northern California?”