Salty Sky Read online

  Joe started with Taxi Driver, which took the girls a while to get because they’d never heard of it. One of the girls did Avatar. Another did Harry Potter. Ashley went with Titanic. They did books next. The first girl spanked her bottom and then humped the coffee table. The other girls shouted out Fifty Shades of Grey. Joe had to have the book explained to him. He let the explaining, which was a group charade in itself, go on longer than needed.

  Tony returned with two young guys—well, fortyish guys, distinctly younger than Joe or Tony and distinctly older than the trainers. They were flushed with sun and beer. They struck Joe as stand-up guys. They must have struck Tony that way too, and Tony usually called it right.

  The not-so-young guys were on a bachelor party trip. The one with the sunburned feet was the betrothed—Blake. Not to his first bride. They took seats, and the captain mixed their drinks. Their manners were good, and they waited for the others to refill their glasses before they drank. Their accents were Southern but not country. Outside of a few y’alls and one dadgummit, Joe figured they’d have carried a barroom conversation in the city with no problem.

  Sweat from his glass beaded and dripped over Joe’s fingers when he picked up his drink. With Tony back and the new guys needing seats, Ashley scooted herself farther under Joe’s arm. The bachelor was in the cups and locked into a conversation with one of the other girls. The nonbachelor, Van, showed a quick wit and good cadence on his delivery. He and Tony bantered back and forth.

  “So why does someone from New York or New Jersey—or do they just call it Jersey now—have to choose either Nets-Jets-Mets-Islanders or Knicks-Giants-Yankees-Rangers? What type of self-hating person would choose the Nets-Jets-Mets-Islanders? None of those teams win, and half those teams don’t even play in New York. It’s like someone from North Carolina rooting for the Bullets—I mean Wizards—Panthers-Braves-Hurricanes.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been hearing for years there are some nice cities here in North Carolina. So I visited Charlotte and Raleigh, and the people are all real nice. But where is the city?”

  Lunge. Parry.

  Another tanned fortyish guy with a round face and glasses peeked his head up the ladder.

  “Joe, Tony, girls. Meet our compatriot, Barry.”

  “Barry, you look an honorable sort. What are you doing consorting with these two? Look at this lush you’re traveling with. He’s rubbing thighs with a maiden who I’m pretty sure is not his bride-to-be. And don’t get me started on this other piece of work.”

  “Is he sharing a few opinions?”

  “Does the pope wear a funny hat? Have a drink. Maybe you can improve the conversation.”

  Everyone shifted around to make room. Ashley’s full body now pressed against Joe’s side. His arm had fallen asleep. It wasn’t enough to make him move. His bladder was full. That wasn’t enough to get him to move either.

  Barry pointed out the runabout that brought him onboard, Van, and Blake waved to their friends aboard it, who weren’t looking up. One guy and two girls were dancing on the runabout. A second guy—tall and muscled, with his shirt off and floral board shorts—was fiddling with the engine. Joe watched him hop into the water and clear finishing line from his prop.

  After one drink, the tanned, round-faced man (Barry, was it?) motivated the bachelor and the nonbachelor to get moving. The nurses were ready to get into town and left with them. The runabout looked overloaded casting off. Joe took the opportunity to descend the ladder and use the head.

  He chatted with the trainers, but didn’t find any common interest other than the logistics of when they were going to shore and where they were docking. Joe watched the trainers play hearts for a couple of minutes. After seeing the queen of spades mishandled two hands in a row, he moved on.

  Why did they want the party if they were going to play cards? It struck Joe that these guys, behind their big talk, were more comfortable looking aloof than engaging with the world around them. They were cool in appearance but terrified the world would see through them if they risked reaching out. That nugget of insight put their behavior in a different light. He figured after a few more drinks, they would break character and give themselves the excuse of “being hammered,” as they called it, if they failed.

  Joe scanned the main deck. Tony was chatting up a woman with a minimal outfit and a sly smile. Joe thought that if she’d had pale winter skin, a sweatshirt, and dungarees, Tony wouldn’t have noticed her. That wasn’t right; he reconsidered. Tony noticed everyone. He was a true gentleman—in the important ways, at least. But the tone of his conversation would have been a lot different without glimpses of bronzed nipple in the strappy bikini.

  Turning the other way, Joe began to search out the owners of the boats rafted alongside them. He introduced himself, met some good people and some who took advantage of good people. He let everyone know he was pulling anchor pretty soon and that he hoped to see them at the bar tonight. With notice given, he retired to the flybridge and prepared a cocktail for the sunset.

  When Joe was midway through his drink, Tony came up the ladder. No words spoken, he made his own drink and sat next to Joe, watching the orange light sink into the tree line behind the marsh. Below, the last of the rafters tossed off their lines and headed somewhere else. Sitting, watching night take over, and with Ashley’s scent embedded in his memory, Joe felt like he was beginning a journey.

  9

  ASHLEY GOT UP early on Saturday, hoping to get a jog in before the day’s travel. Joe, Tony, and the captain were already up and about when she came out of the cabin. They were preparing to cast off. The Atlantic was too stirred up for travel. Instead, they doubled back south on the Intracoastal a short ways and anchored offshore an uninhabited island of small sand dunes.

  She watched Joe swan dive off the front of the boat into the water and swim toward the sand dunes. Something pleasant brought a smile to her face: The dive and his strokes looked like the old black-and-white Tarzan movies or TV shows, or whatever they had been. She’d always seen them on TV on Saturday mornings. Saturday mornings in her house, before everyone woke up and whatever trouble the day would bring started, was her favorite time at home—probably the only time she actually liked being at home.

  Following that mental thread took her too far down the memory trail. The memories that came next took the light out of her and made it hard for her to breathe.

  Why had her mother stayed with her father? Because she was a drunk? Her mother knew what he was. Was it because she didn’t want to leave the double-wide trailer parked at the front of the mobile home park where her husband worked? Because she didn’t want to burn that last bridge she hadn’t burned? Was it just because he needed her so badly in his chest-pounding, bullying way?

  Why did her father need her mother so much? When the booze faded her looks, did he still feel like more of a man for having her with him? When he sat on the porch in his white plastic chair and shot bottles pinned to the clothesline, did he need her to see how good a shot he was? During his evening rounds in the mobile home park, collecting rent door to door with a pistol in the small of his back, another strapped on his ankle, and a blackjack on his side, did he want her to see how tough he was? Was that why he had her inch their red Ford Ranger along behind him while he made his rounds?

  Ashley sat in the front seat for many of these trips. She had watched her father collect money from their neighbors. Or intimidate them if things weren’t as they should be.

  Kids yelled out, “Momma, rent man here,” when they saw him coming. Nobody had a checking account. Some paid with money orders. Most used cash. Her father stuffed the money orders and cash in a fanny pack strapped across his stomach.

  Sometimes, folks disappeared on him in the middle of the night, leaving a balance and a trashed trailer. Her father fixed, cleaned, and rented the trailers. Some folks didn’t pay and wouldn’t leave until her father marched them out. More than once, he needed the pistol to get them to leave. Waiting for an indifferent court syst
em wasn’t his style. Despite his obvious weapons and ability to use them, a full fanny pack of cash was a strong motivator for the hungry to take risks. More than once, she had heard the commotion of would-be robbers paying for their efforts.

  He was good at his job. He could sell. He could fix things. He could collect. She knew his problem wasn’t his skills. It wasn’t good tenants, bad tenants, or muggers. His problems were, in the language of the preacher at the Primitive Baptist Church they went to on the first Sunday of each month, the demons inside him. He fed his demons, and they grew strong. Greed made him skim cash from the owner, and pride made it so he couldn’t stand to even hide what he was doing. She’d hear him say to her mother, “Weren’t for me, he wouldn’t get nuthin’ out of this place. I’d say he owes me this little extra and then some.”

  When Ashley was thirteen, he’d had the job for seven years. By then, his records showed each week that he collected more than he turned over. He wanted the owner to know he wasn’t stealing from the tenants; he was stealing from him—the owner, his boss. For a while, he kept an extra hundred dollars a week. That grew to an extra five hundred dollars.

  Finally, in front of the house, the owner showed up with two deputies. Ashley was getting off the school bus. She saw her father cuffed and marched to the cruiser. She saw her mother come around the side of the house. From a hundred yards off, she recognized her glazed eyes. Her mother half concealed a pistol at her side. Ashley froze. Her mother raised the pistol. Ashley didn’t know whether she was going to shoot the sheriff’s men, the owner, her father, or herself. She hoped she wouldn’t fire at anybody.

  Her mother fired at the owner. She missed. A deputy tackled her. The pistol slid through the dust under the lattice that edged the bottom of their mobile home.

  As her parents were put in the back of the car, Ashley walked past her double-wide, eyes straight ahead. She followed the figure-eight loop around the park. The other kids ran to tell what had happened. She heard a door open and someone yell, “Rent man’s wife shot the lawman! There’s blood everywhere!” The story grew. Folks came out of their trailers for a looksee.

  When she felt too many eyeballs, she climbed a post and jumped the barbed wire fence separating the park from the ranchland next door. She stayed out of sight on the ranch until dark, and then headed for the road so she wouldn’t have to walk past all the trailers. Along the road, she walked in the dry drainage ditch. She lay flat when she saw headlights.

  She returned to the trailer park. Her home was unlocked, so she sat in the dark in her mother’s cloth recliner and crushed a pack of Newports. It felt peaceful in the empty house. She kept the lights out. She pulled on a bathrobe that was on the floor beside her, reclined back, and slept.

  She didn’t go to school the next day, and nobody came to check on her. She grabbed a newspaper from a neighbor’s patio to see whether her parents were in it. They weren’t.

  That night, she searched her parents’ bedroom. It didn’t take long. It was only eight feet wide, ten feet long, and seven feet high. There was a dresser, a bed, a lamp. She found her father’s mason jar of cash above a ceiling tile. It wasn’t hard to spot. The ceiling tile was stained from where his fingers pushed it up and set it back in place every day. She found two pistols and the blackjack and the phone number for her grandfather. She recognized the name, but she had never met him, and she didn’t know where he lived. Her mother barely knew him. She said he went to sea when she was a baby, and her mother left with another man before the aircraft carrier returned.

  She called the number, and a man answered. She hung up. Her hands shook. She grabbed a phone book and looked up the location of the area code. San Diego.

  She packed the money, guns, blackjack, and two changes of clothes in her backpack and set the alarm clock in her room. She slept under the bathrobe on the recliner again. Her alarm went off before sunrise. She brushed her teeth, grabbed a pair of Mello Yellos out of the refrigerator, and added her toiletries to her backpack. She put on her mother’s cowboy boots. The boots took her to five foot eleven. She put on an Exxon trucker hat and slipped her blonde ponytail through the back. She locked the trailer, walked to the Ranger, and started driving west.

  The Ranger traveled the state road for two hours before she stopped for gas. At the first gas station, she didn’t pull in close enough to the pump to fill up the gas tank. She backed up and bumped a trash can. She panicked and pulled back onto the road. Thirty miles later, at the second gas station, she parked and fueled without incident. She bought an atlas of the western United States, a two-liter Mello Yello, and a package of pork rinds.

  That night, she slept in a Walmart parking lot. The Ranger’s seat didn’t recline, so she leaned against the driver’s side window. She used the bathrobe as both blanket and pillow. The second night, she slept in the parking lot of a casino. By noon on the third day, she was parked off Cabrillo Freeway, near downtown San Diego, staring at a pay phone and hyperventilating.

  She dialed. He answered. She hung up. She dialed. He answered. She got out “Grandpa” and then sobbed. Her first tears. He listened. She added three quarters before she was calm enough to be understood.

  He came to get her. He brought a neighbor to drive the Ranger. They went back the way she had just come, to his house on the east side of San Diego.

  She settled down, and he checked on her parents. They didn’t make bail. He got her mother to appoint him guardian, and she enrolled in school. She called him “Chief,” like his friends did, after his final rank in the navy. He died shortly after she graduated from college. She missed him.

  Turning back to the east, Joe was now walking out of the water and into the dunes. She went to her cabin. She imitated the knocking pattern from last night. Her friends made seductive calls back to her knocks. They were tying on bikinis and laughing when she entered. She took her suit off the hook and put it on. They went to the galley, sliced cantaloupe and watermelon, filled a platter. A box of Cheerios, a strainer full of blueberries, and stacked bowls were on the table. There were carafes of milk and orange juice in a bucket of ice. This she could get used to.

  Tony sipped coffee and worked a crossword puzzle on the couch in the salon. He winked at the girls. Ashley noticed there was a bottle opener built into the bottom of his flip-flops. She was pretty sure he didn’t know it was there.

  The captain cleaned salt off the windows and portholes using a squeegee attached to an extension pole. He dunked the squeegee in a bucket and leaned slightly forward so he could see his work. He made several slow back-and-forth motions with the sponge, then spun the pole in his hand and made long, clean, upward pulls with the rubber blade. Not for the first time, Ashley wondered whether this type of work was something he loved more than something that needed to be done.

  After breakfast, they swam to the island. Joe came through the dunes from the ocean side, discretely pulling in his gut when he noticed them. This made her feel good, and she gave him an extra squeeze with his hug. She found herself wondering how old he was. How many years would he still be active? And if she wasn’t trying to deny the truth, attractive. Ten? Twenty? She guessed he was near sixty.

  On the ocean side, it was breezier. They walked south four miles, talked a lot about not much. It was pleasant. Birds ran away, and ghost crabs scuttled into holes. Ashley found a sand dollar still whole, brown, and slightly fuzzy. A broken piling lay in the sand. It was covered in barnacles that were alive. Their shells opened, gasping for water. The mass dying made Ashley queasy. Pretty funny for an emergency room nurse, she thought. Queasy over barnacles.

  They didn’t talk much as they headed north into the breeze. She watched a surfer in floral shorts ride a wave nearly two hundred yards before hopping off his board in ankle-deep water less than twenty-five yards from them. She had watched his fluid physique and movements on the long ride and was surprised that up close his face, unlike his physique, indicated he was middle-aged.

  The girls couldn’t figure out w
hich path to take across the dunes, and it didn’t really matter. They were just going to end up too far north or south. When they got to the mainland side, they saw the boat and reoriented themselves. There were plenty of sunbathers on the waterway side of the island. The girls waded in the warm water. The bottom was between sandy and muddy.

  When they were parallel to the boat, they started to swim out. Halfway across, they were twenty-five yards behind the boat, so they swam back to shore and got a lift. A party was in progress when they arrived, the music pounding. Ashley shut the door to the main salon as she went in, dulling the noise from outside. She fixed a late lunch. She stood in the galley, eating and flipping through an entertainment magazine—oh, the struggles of the rich and beautiful once they became famous. Taking in the yacht’s salon, she wondered whether for her, getting the rich part would be worth the cost.

  When she finished eating, she went outside and danced with her friends. She twirled away from a couple of guys who wanted to dance with their manhood pushed a little aggressively against her backside. She talked with Tony for a bit while her friends were getting cleaned up. She was the last to go into her cabin to shower.

  She put on a spaghetti strap dress and high-heeled sandals and joined her friends on the deck. Gino told her they were invited to the flybridge, so she climbed up and scooted in next to Joe. She smelled the day’s salt, sweat, and suntan lotion on him. The smell fit a leader at ease. She again tried to pinpoint his age. Tony entertained the girls, then left and came back with two guys she hadn’t met. One guy’s feet were so pink that a whole tube of aloe wouldn’t have helped. He sat next to one of her friends. She couldn’t hear their conversation, but her friend was all smiles and sparkly eyes.

  At Ashley’s friends’ request, they left the Ferretti with Pink Feet and his friends. They hopped into a small boat whose owner, she realized, was the guy she’d watched surfing. Ashley sat in the bow and looked back, hoping to catch his eye, but he was focused on his work.