America America (7 page)

“No, he hasn’t, Mom,” said Christian.

“Good,” said Mrs. Metarey, “then he doesn’t have any bad habits.” She took a long draw on her cigarette and tossed the rest of it out her husband’s window.

“Bad habits indeed, June,” said Mr. Metarey.

Andrew looked up again from where he’d been resting, somewhat alarmed it seemed to me. “Don’t worry,” he said across the seat. “I’ll teach you.”

So it turned out in the end that I was a guest. The boat was berthed at the near end of Port Carrol, ten miles north on the lake, and while Mr. Metarey and Andrew went about setting up, Christian took me up the dock to show me the spot where Franklin Roosevelt had moored the
Potomac
. Churchill barked and tugged on the leash as we walked. Christian pointed over the water and explained that a series of locks separated the lake from the Saint Lawrence Seaway, so that a ship laden with ore could bypass Niagara Falls down to Lake Ontario and from there find a deepwater passage to the Atlantic. The dog bounded ahead, pulling Christian wherever he found a scent among the pilings. It was still early in the morning and nobody else was about, and finally Christian unlocked a gate so that we could walk out onto the long section of slatted dock where the slips were. Only the Metareys’ held a sailboat. It was called
The Adirondack
. Onboard, Andrew and Mr. Metarey were taking care of various tasks, moving nimbly about the deck, and even though I was fairly certain by now that I wasn’t supposed to be working, it still seemed to me I should have been helping them. Christian was carrying my mother’s pie, and when we finally boarded she went inside the cabin and set it on the table.

“Corey Sifter,” she said as I followed her into the low, dark room, where the porthole gave us a view of Andrew threading rope through a pulley outside, “you
are
different from the rest.”

I picked up the tin. “I really didn’t bake it, you know.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

We emerged again onto the deck just as Andrew hopped down onto the pier, untied the lines, and walked us backwards out of the slip, leaping back onboard at the last moment. Then we were backing out of the marina and motoring along the narrow straits of the channel. I watched everything.
The Adirondack
was a beautiful boat, built of varnished mahogany with a trim of redder wood where the cleats and hardware were bolted, and the folds of the sails and even the coiled rope shone like washed laundry in the morning light. Mr. Metarey was at the wheel. Andrew moved around the deck uncoiling lines from cleats, checking them and recoiling them again; Christian moved up to the front by Clara, and the two of them lay down against the side handrails at the front quarter of the hull, where Churchill made a place for himself between them; June Metarey retreated to a folding chair by the door of the cabin, where she sipped from a tumbler as her husband studied a chart spread under glass below the wheel. We motored clear of the last pilings and turned out toward the breakwater. Ahead, the marina’s entrance flags were whipping. Mrs. Metarey zipped her jacket and leaned forward into the wind. I knelt down against one of the rails midway to the rear, nearer to Andrew and Mr. Metarey. Then suddenly Andrew was pumping his arms and the sail was up and the boat lurched forward and surged out into the strait.

We carved through the water. Near the wave-break, he pulled on a rope and we rose steeply up on the keel. I climbed the deck, and when I took hold of the rail on the high side I saw Christian and Clara laugh together. I couldn’t hear it but even with their heads turned I could see it in their shoulders. Mrs. Metarey was smiling, too, her chin thrust forward into the wind. Christian and Clara remained at the forward tip, both of them barefoot, Clara’s arms draped into the frothing wake where the prow sliced the water.

“He’s just sensible!” I heard.

It was Mr. Metarey shouting from the rear.

“I can already see that,” he went on, shaking his head. “Unlike you girls!”

Andrew came up to the high side and stood next to me.

Mrs. Metarey sipped from her tumbler. “We’re eminently sensible,” I heard her reply.

For a short distance we moved along the beach, then turned west and headed out into the darker water. The boat tilted one way and then the other. It wasn’t a feeling I liked, but before long I’d relaxed enough to come down and stand in the middle of the deck while the hull shifted with each tack. The harbor was in a small east-pointing finger of the lake, and soon we had moved out from its close shelter. The open water was breathtakingly large from this vantage, the shore more and more distant until eventually I could see only the flagpole at the breakwater and then nothing but the far-off stripe of the trees. At the crest of Pond Hill, long in the distance, the Lodge Chief Marker made a dim point against the sky.

At noon Mr. Metarey turned the boat into the wind. Andrew lowered the sail, and Mrs. Metarey came up from below with sandwiches. We ate with our legs dangling from the deck. Churchill sat where his leash had been tied to the cabin door, pulling apart two pieces of bread to get at the roast beef. I had never drunk beer at lunchtime, but this was what Mrs. Metarey offered. “Law of the sea,” she said, handing me a bottle. “Jack Kennedy would say so.”

“Could make you seasick, Corey,” said Andrew. “You don’t have to drink it. There’s water, too.”

“Jack Kennedy wouldn’t drink on the water,” called Mr. Metarey from the rear.

“That’s why he didn’t sail much, dear,” said Mrs. Metarey. “And besides, Andrew, it
helps
seasick.”

“In that case I’ll have another one,” said Clara.

“You share one with Christian or me,” said Andrew.

“I would deem that unlikely.”

“Now we’re going to have Corey’s delicious pie,” said Christian.

“Corey baked it himself,” Clara said again.

Christian glanced at her, and I did, too. She seemed to be angry at me, and I didn’t know why.

“He’s learning to cook,” she went on. “He burned the first one.”

“Well, let’s hope this is the second one, then,” said Mr. Metarey.

“What kind is it again, Corey?” said Clara. “Father chokes if he eats boysenberries. It happened at the McNamaras’.”

“Actually, I can’t remember what’s in it,” I said. “I don’t remember boysenberries, though.”

“That’s a boy, Corey,” called Mr. Metarey. “You’re going to go a long way around here.”

“Andrew,” said Clara, “I said I’ll have another one.”

Andrew sat down on the ice chest. “You can share it.”

“Mother!”

“Enough!” said Mrs. Metarey. “First we’re going to finish our sandwiches. Then we’re going to devastate this delicious pie, whatever it is. Then we’re going to sit down and find out all about our guest.”

But nobody ever asked me any questions, and after we had finished the pie, which turned out to be strawberry-rhubarb, Andrew raised the sail and we picked up and headed farther out into the lake. The beer had eased my legs, as Mrs. Metarey said it would, and after a time I noticed that I had relaxed. We moved in long, easy tacks now toward the shore, which had come into sight again to the east. Andrew and Mr. Metarey had changed places, and in Andrew’s hands the boat moved more calmly through the long, low swells that had come up in the steady wind and were large enough to have been on an ocean. Clara and Christian knew they could no longer tease me by lying close to the water, and Christian had sat down at the lunch table, where she was reading. Mrs. Metarey had gone below, and through the door I could see her lying on one of the cabin beds trying to kick off her shoes. The straps had caught around her ankles. Through the round window I watched her two calves work against each other, trying to free themselves, then kick furiously until one of the shoes finally fell off. I looked away. Clara had changed into a long skirt and stood at the rear rail now, watching our wake.

“Basically,” Andrew said when I wandered down close to the wheel, “there’s a few knots you need to know—but it sounds like you already know ’em. And a few fancy words, to use around the bar.
Port
means left and
starboard
means right and
sheet
is a kind of rope. Not a sail, which a lot of people think. Or you can say
line
.” He rolled his eyes. “
Sail
is still sail,” he said. “There’s no special word for that.”

“You’re a soldier,” I said.

“I guess I am.”

“How long you back for?”

“They gave me a week.”

Later, when I was in college, some of my classmates talked about their older brothers living in Canada. For the kids I grew up with in Saline, though, Canada wasn’t an option. Certainly not for the son of Liam Metarey.

“That scare you?” I asked.

“Scare me?”

“Being in Vietnam.”

He laughed. “I assumed you meant being back here.” He unrolled a chart onto the stand and examined it. “I’m assigned to the Roads and Grounds Section of the Post Engineers,” he said. “C Company. Fort Dix.”

I looked at him.

“New Jersey,” he said.

“Oh.”

“They don’t send guys like me over to fight.”

“I didn’t figure, really.”

He looked at me appraisingly. “You want to know what I do?”

“If you can say.”

He laughed. “I pour asphalt. Set a few fence posts. Pull a tractor mow. Not too bad.” The edges of the chart began to flutter, and he turned his head and looked to the west. “Although I suppose a post could fall on me.” Then he patted me on the shoulder—something his father would do many times over the years. “But yeah,” he said, “I’d be plenty scared if they shipped me over.”

He gripped the wheel with two hands and turned it, and in a moment the gust was on us. Then it passed, and I watched the craze of ripples skip away over the water.

“You remember everything I told you so far, Corey?”

“Port, left,” I said. “Starboard, right. Sheet, not rope.”

“Perfect. Now you can drink at the captain’s club.”

He turned to look ahead of us, where a Great Lakes freighter had come onto the horizon, and for some reason I turned the other way, where Clara, facing us now in her skirt at the rear railing, knit her brow at me and then slid off the deck into the water.

“Hey!”

I shook Andrew. Churchill ran to the stern, barking. The boat broke to the left and bit into a turn and I saw Clara kick out of the wake and throw back her hair and plunge under. Then Mr. Metarey was beside us. He took the wheel and turned the boat sharply into the wind so that the boom came around and the mainsail flapped thunderously above us. The hull went dead in the water and then bumped as the wake ran under it. Clara was already thirty yards back, her hair a black pelt in the dark water.

“She can swim,” said Mrs. Metarey, reaching her head out of the cabin.

Mr. Metarey looked back.

“Don’t go around for her, Liam. She’ll catch up.”

But Andrew had already gone forward to lower the sail and in a moment I heard the rumble of the engine from below. The boat swung in a broad arc and when we pulled alongside Clara she came shivering up the folding ladder onto the deck.

“How was the water, dear?” said Mrs. Metarey. One shoe still dangled on her ankle.

“Splendid, Mother.” She was staring furiously, at her father it seemed to me.

Mr. Metarey went below for a moment and returned with a towel, which he tried to wrap around her; but she shrugged him away and draped it herself around her shoulders. Churchill was sitting calmly now. Andrew took off his sweater and put it over her, and then she stood there looking at all of them, her dark eyes passing from her mother to her father to Christian.

“Well,” she said finally, “I fell in.”

“Please,” said Mrs. Metarey.

“Andrew came up short on a tack. I wasn’t expecting it.”

“Churchill deems that unlikely,” said Christian.

The dog let out a bark.

“I never changed tack,” Andrew answered.

“I seem to remember it the same way,” said Christian.

“Well, I’m the one who fell in. You were all below.”

“Nobody was below,” said Mrs. Metarey. She reached and yanked off her shoe.

Clara looked around furiously. “Corey saw it, didn’t you? I fell in when Andrew veered.”

“Ah, but we know Corey is a diplomat,” said Mr. Metarey.

“Didn’t I, Corey?” Clara said, and she turned and fixed me in her stare, a stare that I had no power in those days to resist, nor even to comprehend.

“You fell in,” I finally said.

“Corey Sifter!”

“You’re boring all of us, Clara,” said Mrs. Metarey finally, starting for the cabin again. She leaned her head back out the door. “Except, obviously, for our guest.”

“L
ORD KNOWS
you probably do enough around here already, Corey,” Mr. Metarey said one afternoon not long after, “but I wonder if I could ask just one more thing.”

“Yes, sir.” I rose from the walk where I’d been having an iced tea with Christian after work.

“We’re having a little affair Tuesday night,” he said. “God knows why—” He picked up a few pebbles from the walk and tossed them into the bushes. “You’ll have to ask my wife about that one. In any case, just a little party. A gathering. One of the bar-backs just called in sick and Mrs. Metarey thinks we could use another hand.”