Follow the Sun. Edward J. Delaney

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      6.

      THE PUCK’S ON YOUR STICK; NOW TURN UP ICE. THE PIVOT and quick look. See who’s open. The wide white expanse, the fresh layer. The wheeling of players, peripherally, planets in orbit. The bite of blades into the sheet, the churn of legs. The air, cold. The low thunder of everyone surging, skates pounding the ice and echoing from a rink’s low girders. Your hands are soft in the thick gloves, feeling the puck through the length of the stick. The moment seems attenuated. The faces seem familiar. Keep moving, keep moving.

      Quinn opens his eyes. Another of his limited slate of recurring dreams, again and again. In this dream he’s still in high school, on the ice, but in it he’s also a middle-aged man. He sometimes wonders why he goes back to it so constantly. But he knows it was the best time he had, and so brief. His frequent and painful return to the happy past.

      His dreams are all backward-looking now, and that’s a vague worry. The grind of the work doesn’t forge hopeful visions. He feels old. He feels spent. The radial ache in his shoulders when he falls back on his mattress makes him wonder: How do I keep on? The seduction of physical work is about not thinking of any future, not to anticipate the worn years and insistent aches. In a body sagging with fatigue, the mind doubles back to the crystalline moments of furious youth, which you didn’t bother to note at the time because you thought you couldn’t possibly run out of them.

      The end of winter hangs on. The snow still dusts the ground and the skies hang flat and compressing on the mirror-gray harbor. The pleasure boats stand in hibernation on their cradles, shrink-wrapped in white polyethylene sheaths and lined down the dirt road of the storage barn, a herd of eyeless beasts awaiting their spring molting.

      The only sound off the harbor is the waterline thrum of diesel work engines, the egress of the commercial fleet, barnacled hulks slipping out toward the far sky. March has a dour taste to the workingman, be it rubber-clad fishermen on the water or the flannel-wrapped roofers up in cold winds, or the road crews working into the early darkness of the winter day.

      Quinn has no taste at all for lobster. He hasn’t eaten one in twenty years. He generally eschews fish, the way an office type avoids seeing coworkers off-hours. They’re enemy combatants. With the bugs, he’s been cut and clamped so many times that to enter a restaurant on that rare occasion, and to see them docile in a bubbling water tank, elicits a strange melancholy, and possibly even fraternity.

      Restaurants no more, anyway. He’d gone underground after his release, but he knew Botelho’s wife was resolutely on the case. She was manic to have her say. He could have told her how it was: that they had the life vests per regulations, but the regulations didn’t say you had to be wearing one. That it was easy to get too blasé walking along the open stern as the trawl let out with the big polyball floats and the ground lines and ganglion whooshing wetly by your ankles. An article of faith, out there, was that the ones who lived were the smart ones, and the others simply attrition. That people misstep, all the time, but it’s worse with forty liquid fathoms beneath you.

      Then there was that night he saw her. This was in Jack’s Bar, when he’d only begun to venture there, tired of drinking alone on the new boat, and tired of avoiding Robbie as he had in those early months out of prison. She was with an old man who had the roughened look of someone only now at rest from a life of work. Quinn found a stool down on the lee side of the cash register and looked down into his beer mug; when he looked up, he saw her, the face a hard mask of pure hatred. He would never have recognized her, but the face was what told him what he needed. She was blinking furiously, and her face reddened; she had the tough look of someone who’d been trading shots since birth.

      This was the night she said nothing, before the rants and drunken keening, before she arrived at a point where going after him gave her the same pump as the drinks would, and became her tailored act, the endless victim. But it was this night, knowing that reaction across the bar might have been the one genuine moment between them, that he felt truly awful. He was being haunted by proxy.

      Two more first-timers on board for this run, predictably. Quinn pretty much knew it when he was casting off, but these guys are even worse than he’d expected. They’d come down to the docks that morning, looking for work. He’d said, “Okay, get on.”

      The two of them, eighteen or nineteen at best, looked at each other.

      “Right now?” one of them said.

      “Get on and off we go,” Quinn said. “We can still beat the day.”

      The other one laughed. “Seriously?”

      “I thought you wanted to work.”

      “I got plans tonight.”

      Quinn leaned against the gunwale. “So when do you want to go? Because I’m ready now. I have paperwork you can sign.”

      “What are you going to pay us?”

      “The shares split six ways,” Quinn said. “One share for the boat, one for the fuel, two for me as the owner and deck boss, one each for you as stern men. That’s if we go right now. If we kill half the day while you decide, then you two split one share and I take one more for wasted time.”

      Quinn looked at them in a hard squint. “But if you have such big plans . . .”

      “We’ll СКАЧАТЬ