The Bully of Order (11 page)

“Will it be cold?”

“Not much colder. There will be wind.”

“Can we see whales? Zeb said his dad took him fishing and they saw whales.”

“Maybe from the beach. We won't be on the water.” She adjusted her hat and smiled, three small moles on her left cheekbone, a constellation. “I'm glad you and Zeb are friends.”

“Course we're friends. We're best friends. I'm smarter than him.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because I can make him do what I want.”

“That's not the way you should think of your friends.”

“Why?”

“It's important to care for people. To be kind.”

“I'm not mean to him. People are mean to me.”

“They're just teasing. Don't let them bother you.”

“I don't care.”

“Of course you don't.”

“But sometimes I care.”

“They'll give it up. You'll see. You just need to outlast them. Don't let them get under your skin and don't let them know when they do.”

Easy for her to say. She was pretty, everybody said so. Everybody watched her. She had her hand on my shoulder and I leaned against her and felt the boat roll.

We passed log booms and shacks and slash fires, newly built and painted houses and shops, bright and streaky with colors that seemed to run into the air and leach into the mud.

We docked at the mill pier because that's where the ferry always stopped. We got off and went along the plank road to the wharf where the real holiday steamers were assembled to take us to the beach. Ribbons and streamers were everywhere. Sleek, shining ships filled the harbor. People crowded the streets. I could smell the bakery even though it was closed. We used to live here when I was a baby. I don't remember much of that time. Mother was looking off up the hill toward the middle of town where the buildings were biggest. The bakery was too short and low to see with everything else in the way.

There were dozens of children from other schools and I didn't know any of them by name. My mother pushed me toward them but I spun around and hid behind her stiff muslin skirt. Some of the boys had hats and I wanted one. Mother had her hair up and her plaid blouse was ironed and flat. She carried a canvas bag with our lunch and extra coats. Little girls with braids and white dresses held hands and ran in circles on the wharf.

The ship we were to board was decked in blue bunting like the rest. A band was marching in the streets of town, and after boarding, a band set up in the bow and started right in and the band onshore stopped their song and waited, and then joined in with the band on the boat. We stood at the rail in the stern of the steamer and watched the wake. It was loud with the two streams of music and the wind and everybody talking and crowded and I was ready to get off. The ship was just like the ferry, no different. The wake was just the same, only bigger. We weren't going any faster. Steel was colder and somehow just as slimy as wood.

“Stop that,” Mother said.

“What?”

“You're moping.”

“I'm not.”

“You are. There's a rumor that a ship is beached on the coast.”

“A shipwreck?”

“Yes.”

I thought of pirates and deserted islands, solitary endeavors, days and eventually years surveying an isolated and foreign land, surviving, prospering, escaping heroically, a flash of genius and daring; upon my return a celebration not unlike the Fourth. My mother let me read by the fire before I went to bed and I had the stories in my head always.

Gulls passed through the smoke from the stack. I'd had an apple after breakfast on the way to town earlier but I was hungry again. The mist covered the hills and blocked the openness of the coast. The carts of clamdiggers dotted the shoreline, their shadowy figures working the tide, ebb harvesters. Pelicans and their sagging bags. The grass on Rennie Island was flattened by the wind and the trees all leaned after it, giving needles and leaves, whatever they had. A boy climbed onto the rail and his mother tugged him back down by his pants and gave him a whipping. I wanted to run away but there was nowhere to run.

Mother was speaking to a man in a bowler. It wasn't anyone that I'd seen before. She told me we'd be seeing Dr. Haslett today but it wasn't him—they wore the same hats is all. We hadn't seen Dr. Haslett for a long time and I rarely thought of him anymore. This man had a mustache and a big nose and he was big, much bigger than Father. His gray suit didn't fit him and it was too tight to button over his chest. He smelled strongly of vinegar and his fists hung out of the inadequate sleeves like kneaded dough that had been left on the board to dry out. His mustache was red and black and gray and so was the curly hair sticking out from under his hat. Mother caught me staring and introduced the man as Mr. Tartan, a friend of Mr. Bellhouse's from the Sailor's Union. He took my hand in his and squeezed until it hurt and wouldn't let go. The pressure didn't increase but it didn't let up.

“He's grown tall, hasn't he?”

“He has,” my mother said.

“Give me my hand back.”

“I'm not holdin you at all, hardly squeezin. Go and take yer own hand.”

“It hurts.”

“Let him be, Lucas.”

The man let me go and I held my hurt hand with my other one.

“I was playin with him, Nell. I wouldn't a hurt him.”

“You're scaring him.”

“I wasn't scared.”

“Ready to piss yer pants, you toughy slint.”

“I wasn't.”

“It's all right, Duncan,” Mother said.

“I'm not scared a him.”

He leaned down and spoke: “A folly of youth is what that is.”

The ship chugged on and I turned toward the sea and watched the gulls and thought I saw a seal but wasn't sure. There had better be whales and sharks too. My hand hurt. We went by Sentinel City with its dock practically halfway across the harbor. No one was there, not a soul. The whole project had been abandoned. The hills were logged to the waterline and plotted for streets and graded for a railroad but none of it ever came. Father had worked there and had helped build the dock. We'd almost moved because he was offered land instead of pay but Mother wouldn't let him take it. She liked our place and told me Uncle Matius no longer had any claim. I didn't remember my uncle at all. They said I had a cousin too.

Mr. Tartan's big hand reached over my shoulder and patted me on the chest. I turned to see his face but the sun was in my eyes. Something tapped me on my chin and I looked down and there was a silver dollar resting in the folds and calluses of Mr. Tartan's hand. He leaned over and whispered with vinegar breath. “Take it, boy. Hard currency to remind you of our independence.” His breath was hot in my ear.

I took the offered coin and quickly tucked it into my vest pocket.

“Good. Keep it safe.”

“What'd you give him?” Mother asked.

“Between me and the boy.”

“Let me see, Duncan.”

“Don't show her. Keep it private. Me and you.”

And I didn't show her. I kept it hidden.

Long before we arrived at Westport, Mr. Tartan had disappeared back into the crowd. I followed Mother down the gangplank and onto the pier. The high clouds and mist were burning off even at the coast and the sun would be out soon. The slow-moving crowd went on like a funeral procession. I couldn't see anything but legs and backs and hands. Mother kept a tight grip on the collar of my coat. We fell in with a group of women and their children and to my wonderment one of them was Zeb Parker. He was supposed to be at home watching his new baby sister but his mother was with him and she had the baby in her arms.

“Thought you'd have it to yourself didn't you?” Zeb said, grinning.

I smiled at him but didn't say a word. I always felt lonely and I regretted what I'd told Mother about being smarter than Zeb. The best thing that'd happened to us was the Parkers moving in down the road.

We went through the trees to the veteran's grounds where tables were set up among the cabins and tents. A band was playing. We found an open place and spread a blanket and had lunch. Me and Zeb finished our chicken legs and then ran off. Everyone was dressed up and smiling. The sun was out now and the cedar grove was golden and warm and the wind couldn't get at us. I ran through the crowd with Zeb behind me and shoved people in the legs to get them to move. Cedar needles covered the ground and we got pitch all over our hands and pants crawling and wrestling and later trying to climb the trees and their yarny trunks. I could smell the salt of the ocean like a cooked meal drawing me in. Mother was yelling for me, Duncan you come back here Duncan. I laughed and smiled at Zeb and we ducked low and used the crowd for cover and snuck into the madrones.

We followed a sand path out of the trees and over the bluff and stopped dead in our shoes when we saw the open water. Bigness required boundaries but this water had none save the shore we stood upon and the end of my eyeball's reach. It looked like the end. There were more people on the beach, all down it to where the shipwreck sat askew, not so big, and so fragile. It was like a gift given to me, that ship. I couldn't be happier if it were my birthday.

As the sand hill sloped away, it lost its grass covering and flattened into low dunes and beach. It went on for as far as I could see. I knew from Mother's books that we weren't anywhere but in a corner of the big world. Like the corner of the corner tackroom in the barn, where the boards met and made a poor joint and in the void was the spider nest, that's where we were. Outside the ocean. I shouldn't have left Mother alone, even though Big Edna Parker was with her, but that man Mr. Tartan, she called him Lucas, he could come back and bother her. He seemed bothersome, like a bear in a trashpit. I touched the coin in my pocket. Zeb was ripping the flowering heads off a handful of sea-watch. When he was done, he smelled his fingers and made a face.

A black dog ran up and jumped and licked me in the face and ran off, so we chased it and played with it until we were at the shipwreck with everyone else. She was a two-masted schooner sunk in the sand like a piece of driftwood. The crew was still on her taking down the rigging and some men from town were on the ground, heckling. Wind blew us and the birds and everything around, gulls hung like twin-bladed arrow punctures in the sky.

“If you'd done that first, you wouldn't be the main attraction here, eh?” The man on the ground took a pull from his bottle, looked at his friend. “Sailors are slint fuckin dumb.”

“You won't be thinkin that when I split yer fuckin head with a marlinspike.” The sailor was coiling line, and he was fast, never slowed. He belonged in the mill with the rest of the machines.

“So says the bushy-tailed squacker. Landlocked.”

“Most ships,” his acquaintance said, “they go in through the harbor mouth.”

“You don't say.”

“It's true. They seem to perform better when they stay where the water is. Wetness seems to aid the travel of a ship.”

“They require great wetness.”

The drunks couldn't control their laughter, and one of them fell over. “Fourth a fuckin July, and you—fuck, stop it. You're killin my fuckin insides. Fourth a fuckin July.”

“Would you shut up?”

“There're children listening.”

“Oh, so there is. Sorry for the language, boys, but let this be a lesson on careers. Don't be a squackin beach-dwellin dipshit of a sailor when you come of age. Be anything but that.”

“Ignorant stinking loggers. Every last one of you is bone stupid.” The sailor dropped the coil to the beach with the rest of the gear. “And I've seen the world, I know stupid when I see it. You, gentlemen, are world-class. Congratulations.”

“Thanks, squacky. Thanks so much.” The heckler had given up all hope of control, and he convulsed and kicked his legs, tears streaming down his face, laughing harder than I'd ever seen a man laugh. I was amazed. I went and stood over him, smiling, not believing what a spectacle he'd allowed himself to become. But suddenly he came to his senses and locked his eyes on me and kicked at me and hit me in the stomach and it hurt to breathe.

“The fuck you starin at, you little goon?”

I retreated, and Zeb followed, nervous and quick-footed. A woman called to us to stop and then scolded the drunks and forgot about us, so I turned and headed down the beach, holding my stomach and crying a little; it felt like I needed to go to the bathroom or breathe. It hurt, but running made it better, and the beach it went until Alaska or California or somewhere and there were other dogs to play with up ahead. Zeb caught up with me and we found dungy crabs in a singular rocky crag tidepool and messed with them and stacked them on top of each other and tried to get them to fight. If we guided them, they'd lock their pinchers on one another and we could lift them in a string. I tossed the string at Zeb, but it flew apart in the air.

A boy and a girl close to our age arrived and wordlessly joined in. The boy and his sister—had to be his sister, they looked so alike—ran off for a moment and came back with sticks and beat the crabs and smashed some of them. I took the stick away from the boy, twisted it loose from his hand, and we both fell backward.

“Give it back,” the boy said.

“Give him his stick,” his sister said.

“Catch me and I'll give it to you.” I got to my feet and was off. Me and Zeb were much faster than them. The boy was fat and ran stiff-legged and slow. Far down the beach I spotted something black and lumpish on the sand and ran to it but it was just kelp. We stomped the bulbs but they were tougher than they looked and caused us to slip. Zeb climbed on top of the pile and bounced up and down.

“Pretend it's a whale.”

“Been killed,” I said. “By a shark with teeth like this.” I held up the stick in my hands to show him the great size of the teeth. And it was then that the boy tackled me and knocked me down and hit me in the shoulder with a hunk of driftwood. I spun around and swacked him in the face with the stick in my hand and the boy fell backward, covering his eye. I stood and dropped the stick and then picked it up again and threw it off toward the surf. I hadn't meant to hurt him, but he was hurt.