The Summer Guest Read online

  I’ve decided to stay on at the camp through the summer, and here’s the big news—we actually managed to open! After all that’s happened, it seems almost a miracle. I’d like to take the credit, but I can’t. A few days after we got here, people just started showing up—turns out your father never canceled any of the advance reservations—and it was either open for the season or turn them away. The truth is, I was all set just to lock the gate and forget the whole thing, but here’s surprise number two: the first person to show up was none other than Harry Wainwright! (I still remember that night on the porch by cabin nine—what a shock we gave him! I still swear I told you cabin six. How long ago that all seems now.) It was Harry’s idea to open, and now the two of us are more or less running the place, or trying to. It seems a little strange, a man like Harry running around with fresh towels and handing out picnic lunches and hauling out the kitchen trash, but Harry says he doesn’t mind, far from it, and he’s even taught me a little bit about how to do the books. We’re badly in the red, by the way. According to Harry, your father pretty much ran his finances out of an old coffee can, and hasn’t paid a cent of tax to the county since about the time you left. Harry has spent most evenings the last two weeks just trying to put it all in some kind of order we can get a handle on. The general word is that with a few more bookings we may be okay by the end of the season, as long as we can get by with only a couple of part-time guides and one girl in the kitchen. Harry also has a scheme to poach a few tourists from the Lakeland Inn with a kind of daylong outing to look for moose. I can’t see that this will make much difference, but Harry says it could bring in some nice extra money.

  In a way it’s a lucky turn for Harry too. I’m sure you remember that his wife was very sick, and she passed away last spring. Harry didn’t tell me this right away, but I could tell something had happened—I more or less guessed what it was—and when he finally came out with it, a lot of things suddenly fell into place in my mind. He seems very grateful to have something to do, and for now, the camp is keeping both of us plenty busy.

  Well, Joe. Should I say that I miss you? I do, maybe more than ever. It’s very strange to be here without you, like I’m still feeling a part of my body that’s just not there anymore. I thought I’d gotten used to it, but I guess I really haven’t. I’m sorry about everything, especially that I disappeared the way I did. But I think it was the best thing for both of us. My parents are still furious, will barely say a word to me, though when I see my mother she always hugs me very hard, which makes me feel just terrible.

  We are all glued to the television over the election, and wondering what it will mean for you. I don’t know if you know this, but the other big news down here is that eighteen-year-olds can vote. I hardly remember being eighteen. But I know I would have voted against that asshole Nixon (pardon my French!), so maybe there’s hope. Your father says McGovern’s a saint, and saints never stand a chance. Oh, well. What he means is, we all want you home. Me, too.

  Take care of yourself, Joe.

  All my love,

  Lucy

  There was a woman, of course, as Lucy guessed—not the one who made the bracelets, a widow who kept a little shop next door to one of the town’s three bad bars, but her oldest girl, Michelle: a divorced woman in her forties with hair the color of dry tobacco, a seven-year-old daughter, and a sad but warming smile. Jobs outside the plant were scarce but Michelle had a good one, working for LeMaitre’s little newspaper, laying type and editing the classifieds, which, in a town where everything was theoretically for sale if a catch was light, took up ninety percent of its pages. For some time, the better part of a year, we took care of one another, doing all the small things and exchanging all the customary comforts, and if I never told her I loved her, this seemed at the time a small thing, a minor lack. About her ex-husband, Naomi’s father, Michelle spoke not one single word in all the time I knew her.

  The day I received the letter from Lucy began at 5:00 A.M., me and half a dozen other lumpers standing around the wharf in our oilskins and boots in the predawn cold, waiting for the plant crew to show and smoking first cigarettes; once the work started, it would be another three hours before any of us could smoke again. The High Chaparral was in, fifty feet of rust and stink, sitting low in the oily water, its belly fat with fish.

  When the plant whistle blew, Marcel came down to where we were standing.

  “The usual shares, gents,” he announced, and lit a smoke of his own. “Three dollars a thousand. Deckman gets a buck. Joe and Lewis in the hold, Larry works the jilson. Let’s be quick now, get this done by noon.”

  We stepped aboard and lifted the hatch, careful not to leave it upside down—bad luck for certain—then descended the rattling aluminum ladder into the hold, a clammy alley running the length of the ship, with four pens on either side and a big one across the stern, all of it lighted only by the fretted glare of a couple of bare bulbs in metal cages. In the pens, behind pieces of plywood nailed in place, lay seventy thousand pounds of cod, blackbacks, and pollock, cocooned in ice.

  Larry yelled down through the hatch when the jilson was set: “Flats first!” he said, meaning cod.

  We moved to the forward pen, used an ice shaver to jimmy loose the pen boards, and ice and fish poured out. I filled my basket and hooked it to the jilson, gave it a yank.

  “Yuuuuup!”

  Away it went, snatched from the hold and out over the wharf, where Larry guided it into the hopper; from there it would be wheeled up to the long tables of the plant, gutted and filleted, the meat then packed again in ice and loaded on trucks to carry it to Boston or New York or Montreal. The trick was to keep the baskets coming, so that by the time Larry lowered the jilson again, another was ready to go.

  For a year I’d worked the tables for wages, or else manned the loading docks. Lumping the hold was harder work, but it paid better: at three bucks for every thousand pounds of fish, split two ways plus a dollar for Larry, we’d walk away with a hundred and five dollars in our pockets, all before lunch.

  “Yuuuuup!”

  Lewis was Canadian, a lifer, his face red as a slab of steak. We’d worked together a year and had a rhythm down: one of us would step into a pen with a short-handled pitchfork to shovel it out, while the other loaded the jilson, the two of us trading places with every basket to keep the jilson moving.

  “Yuuuuup!”

  At nine we stopped to smoke. Five pens were empty, including the big one at the stern. Both of us had stripped down to our oilskins and gloves, the sweat steaming off us in the dark hold, the meaty vapors of our bodies mixing with the gunmetal smell of fish and ice. Lewis nudged me with his elbow.

  “Drink?”

  Lewis passed me his flask. I wiped off the spout, took a sip, and passed it back. Both of us knew not to stop long enough to light a second cigarette. We were better than half done but the last half was always the largest.

  “You going out on the Bodie?” he asked me after a minute.

  The Chase Bodine had come in a week before; the captain was assembling a crew for a run to the Grand Banks and had offered me a spot.

  “Might. Can’t say.”

  “Ford’s been hitting.” Lewis took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled, using his pinky to pluck a fleck of tobacco from his tongue. He examined it a moment, like it might be something he needed, before flicking it away. “Everyone says so. There’s at least three thousand in it this time of year. That’s good money.”

  “So why don’t you go?”

  He laughed out smoke. “Thirty days, a thousand miles out? Gives me the willies just thinking about it. And Ford didn’t offer, either.” He crushed out the last of his cigarette. “Back to work, Joey.”

  We sent the last of the fish up to the plant a little after noon, scooped out the rest of the ice and dumped it overboard, and hosed down the hold. It was one o’clock when I walked up to the plant office. Marcel ran his enterprise with a machinelike efficiency, but his office looked like a hur
ricane had hit it: piles of paper everywhere, file cabinets full to bursting, invoices and shipping orders and punchcards for employees long gone stacked on every surface. One time I’d noticed, held in place between the mounds of paper, a half-full cup of coffee, tipped at a thirty-degree angle and somehow suspended at least six inches above the desktop. It hadn’t spilled a drop.

  Marcel removed an envelope of cash from the top drawer and handed it to me: a hundred and five, plus ten more. I held up the extra bill.

  “What’s this for?”

  He smiled, pleased I’d noticed. “A little bonus. For finishing by noon.”

  “We didn’t, Marcel. We only just got done five minutes ago.”

  “I put ten in Lewis’s envelope too. I don’t hear him complaining.”

  I deposited the envelope in the chest pocket of my slicker. “That’s because Lewis only has nine fingers to count on. You know, this is no way to run a business.”

  “Maybe not, but I’ll do as I like.” He leaned back in his chair. “Listen, Joe, I heard Ford Conklin’s offered you a spot on the Bodie. You considering it?”

  The truth was, I’d barely thought about it. “Might be. The money’s good. Everybody says Ford’s been doing well.”

  Marcel gave a measured nod. “He has. Ford’s put more than a few dollars in my pocket, I’ll say that. But the banks are a haul, Joe. And it’s getting late in the season. I’ll tell you, if it were up to me, I’d say what the hell, go. But Abby, she’s not so hot on the idea.” He paused and looked out the window beyond his desk. It was a sunless day, the seaway and the sky above both gray as slabs of granite. Far off to the north, a pair of tankers plied the water at the crook of the horizon. Twenty thousand deadweight tons of oceangoing steel apiece, though at this distance, they looked no bigger than a couple of tin toys moving through the crosshairs in a carnival shooting gallery. “Anyway,” Marcel said, and rapped his desk, “I just thought I’d tell you. If it makes a difference, I might be having an opening for a foreman in the next couple of weeks. With you the paperwork’s a little funny, of course, but I think we could work something out. And we sure could use you.”

  I’m sure my face showed my surprise. “Thanks.”

  “Just keep it in mind. And the person you should thank is Abby, because this is really her idea.” He turned to one of the piles, fingering the contents, and produced an envelope. “Before I forget, this came to the house this morning.”

  He handed me the letter over his desk, and at once I saw it was from Lucy. With anybody else I might have waited to read it, but not Marcel. He and Abby had taken good care of me, and if my time of exile had a bright spot, it was those two. I took a chair before his desk, its great towers of paper, and read.

  “Everything all right?” Marcel asked me when I was done.

  I folded the letter and tucked it into my slicker with Marcel’s envelope of money. “Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “No reason. Just, a lot of guys get letters from home, it’s not necessarily good news.” For a moment neither of us spoke. “Well, think about the other, won’t you?”

  “I will,” I said, and rose to go. “Thanks, Marcel. I really will give it some thought.”

  I saw Ford that night at the Breakaway. Michelle was with me; she had left her daughter, Naomi, with her mother, our custom on nights when either of us had just been paid. Like all the bars in town, the Breakaway was little more than a dirty box to drink in, the scene of so many fistfights of such chaotic brutality that the owners had long since given up replacing the glass in the front windows and just left them boarded up. We decided to spring for a couple of real drinks, good Scotch in tumblers instead of the fifty-cent beers we otherwise drank. We were drinking our second when I saw Ford come in.

  In a town like LeMaitre, a fishing boat captain, particularly one who was making money, has an exalted status. As Ford moved through the bar, the crowds parted in his path, all eyes on him and measuring his progress as he approached our table.

  “Joe.” He removed his cap and raked his fingers back through his pepper-gray hair; around us the crowds returned to their beer and talk. “Shelle.”

  “Have a seat, Ford?”

  His eyes moved over the table. “Not just now, thanks. Heard the High Chap brought in seventy thousand.”

  I shook the ice in my glass. “Felt like more.”

  He nodded equably. “That’s what we like to hear. Everybody making money. I don’t like to press, Joe, but I’ve got a crew to put together. Had a chance to think about my offer?”

  Early that morning, talking to Lewis, I’d found myself thinking I’d go; but now I wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t Lucy’s letter, or even Marcel’s offer of a better job, that had unsettled me, but something else Marcel had said: that Abby didn’t want me to go. It felt like an omen, and I had been around the docks long enough to have picked up more than a trace of superstition. Nonsense, but there it was. On the other hand, three grand was three grand.

  “A four percent share, Joe. Can’t hold your place much longer.”

  “Who else is interested?”

  “Lots of folks. Lewis O’Day, for one.”

  “Lewis?”

  “Spoke to me this afternoon. Said you could have first crack, but if you didn’t want it, he’d sign on. I’d rather have you.”

  Michelle scoffed and ground out her cigarette in the ashtray we had already half filled. “That old rumhound? He’d probably fall overboard before you left the dock.”

  Ford rubbed his chin thoughtfully, eyes narrowed. “No secret he drinks. But he’s been out to sea plenty in his day. I’m thinking I could rely on him well enough. And he’s clear he wants to go.”

  I finished my drink and returned the empty glass to the table. The Scotch I’d drunk, or the thought of Lewis taking my place: whatever the reason, declining Ford’s offer suddenly seemed foolish, all air with nothing to push against. Abby would worry, but that was Abby. Nothing was keeping me here. A month at sea—what did I have to lose?

  “Okay,” I said, and gave my glass a conclusive thump on the wood. “Count me in.”

  Michelle sat up abruptly. “Joe—”

  I didn’t let her finish. I looked at Ford again. “When do we leave?”

  “Tuesday next. Back at the end of September.”

  “All right. I’ll be there, Ford.”

  He left us to go find the pay phone, and I turned my attention to Michelle. She was sitting stock-still, her spine straight against the back of the booth.

  “What?”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “What’s the matter, Shelle? The money’s good, you know that.”

  She laughed bitterly, looking away. “How can I be so goddamn stupid?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  As her eyes caught the light I saw a glint of tears. But her face was hard, her jaw set. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? I’ve been down this road before.”

  “What road, Shelle? Are you listening? It’s just a month.”

  “Foreman, Joe. That’s a good job. You didn’t even ask me.”

  I reached my hand across the table to touch her arm, but she pulled away.

  “Don’t,” she said, and sat back, her palms raised, her face almost in a panic. “Just . . . forget it, Joe. Will you? Please? Do me a favor and forget it.” Her eyes fell to the table and she shook her head again. “What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I such a fucking idiot?”

  “I really don’t know what the problem is, Shelle. We’re going to the banks, that’s all.”

  “Great, the banks. Have fun. Look us up when you get back, okay?”

  A moment of silence passed. She lit another cigarette.

  “Shelle—”

  “That’s not the point, Joe.” She rose to her feet, not looking at me, and crushed out the cigarette she had only just lit, three hard stubs into the ashtray. “You asshole,” she said, and before I could answer—Michelle’s last words to me still ringing
in my ears—I was sitting alone at the table with my empty glass.

  We returned in October, ahead of the weather, making port on a day so bright with autumn sun that the surface of the sea seemed shattered. I’d said good-bye to no one—not Michelle, or Lewis, or even Abby and Marcel—and no one was waiting on the wharf to meet me. I wanted it that way. Michelle had seen it before I had. After that night at the bar, I knew what four years had turned me into: a man without love, on whom any kind of love was wasted. Once the hold was cleaned and tallied, I went to the weighing station with my duffel bag, took my share, and marched straight out to the loading docks behind the plant. A single refrigerated truck was parked there, the driver sitting on the running board, reading a fat paperback.

  I held up my duffel bag to show him. “Mind some company?”

  He lifted his broad face, squinting into the sun behind me. I hadn’t shaved or showered and had lost so much weight my pants were cinched tight at the waist with a lanyard. In my pocket, Ford’s wad of folded cash, three thousand and change, felt fat as a bar of soap.

  He made no expression at all. “Don’t you want to know where I’m going?”

  “Okay. Where are you going?”

  He folded down a corner of the page to mark his place and closed his book. I glimpsed the title: The Godfather. “Toronto.”

  It didn’t seem far. “How about after that?”

  “Iowa.”

  “Iowa? What’s in Iowa?”

  “Three vowels.” He slapped his knees and laughed like he’d been waiting his whole life to tell this joke. “Hell if I know what else.”

  I thought about the border, and what might happen to me there. But I had already decided I didn’t care. “Sounds perfect,” I said, and heaved my bag up into the cab, though that was the easy part—I’d carried everything with me, and it still weighed almost nothing.