Джон Макдональд: Pale Gray for Guilt

I stepped high onto the pier decking and looked around. He had a dozen outboards tied up, and maybe half as many inboard-outboard rigs, two smallish cruisers, and, neatly aligned in their slips, the dozen rental houseboats, outboard rigged, fiberglass, white with orange trim. I saw that he’d put up the in-and-out storage he had told me about the last time I’d seen him, over a year and a half ago. Fifteen racks wide and three high. The forklift could tuck forty-five boats in there on monthly storage, but only the bottom row was full, and the middle layer half full.

Up the river from his place and on the other side, where it had all been marshland the last time I was there, I could see, maybe a mile away and more, some squat, pale, technical-looking buildings and a glinting of cars in the industrial parking lot next to them.

There didn’t seem to be anyone around the little marina building, or around the white cement-block motel with the red tile roof that sat parallel to the river and parallel to State Road 80D, and about a hundred feet from each of them. I remember Tush talking about how he was going to expand the motel from ten units to twenty.

“Now that there’s the three kids, me and Janine are taking up two units, and having just eight rentals, I couldn’t tell you the times we’ve had to turn folks away, Trav.”

The slab had been poured for the extra ten units, and the block had been laid up to shoulder-high on about three of them, but some kind of a coarse green vine had taken hold and had crawled along fifteen feet of the wall, spilling tendrils down.

Some of the dock pilings sagged. The pennons on the marina building were bleached gray, wind-ripped and tattered.

“Hey!” yelled Tush. “Hey, now! Hey, McGee!” He had come around the corner of the motel and came toward me in a kind of Percheron canter. A big man. Almost as high as I am, and half again as big around.

Long ago and far away we’d been on the same ball team. Brantley Breckenridge Bannon, second string offensive fullback. First string if he could have gotten into his stride quicker, because he was hard to stop when he was in gear. The nickname had started as BeeBee and had been shortened to Beeb, and it was that season it suddenly turned into Tush. He was a man totally incapable of profanity. The most we ever heard from him, even in the most hideous, unlucky and painful circumstances, was a mumbled “Durn!”

Then in one game we tried running a play that was designed to make up for his slow start. They set him out to the right, and on the snap he had to run to his left, go behind the quarterback who had taken some quick steps back and who had faked a handoff to a wingback slanting right, and who would then spin and stuff the ball into Bannon’s belly on a half cut and an off-tackle slant left.

The first time we ran it, and I was offensive left end at the time, a linebacker thought he smelled a pass, blitzed through, saw what was happening, and rolled his shoulders right into Bannon’s ankles. The second time we ran it, he had a good head of steam but there was absolutely no hole at all, and as he tried to spin along the line and find one they tore him down. The third time we tried it, we were fourth and two at their eleven, so late in the game that we had to go for six points, being four points behind. He got a fine start. We got a good jump and cleared him a big hole. But as he went through the hole he was juggling that ball, hand to chin to chest to forearm to hand, too busy to keep from getting hit, and was hit from the side and the ball floated into the hands of their squatty defensive center, who after a considerable pause to realize he actually had a football right there in his hands, took off in a lumpy little grinning gallop out to their forty before he got pulled down from behind. Bannon, on his knees, ripped off his helmet, whammed it against the sod, stared skyward and yelled, “Oh... TUSH!”

When things went badly for him on one play in the next game, about four of us yelled, “Tush!” And Tush it became, then and forever.

After he was converted to a tackle, he stayed with an AFL team four years, during two of which, being married to Janine, he saved his money. A pinched nerve in his neck turned him into an insurance salesman and he did well but got sick of it, and then he sold houseboats, and then he bought the ten acres on the Shawana River on which to act out and work out the American Dream.

So after the obligatory thumping upon each other, our words of greeting were drowned out by an oncoming roar, deep and grinding, and three big orange Euclids went by on their six-foot tires of solid rubber, loaded high with yards of wet marl, kicking up a powdery dust that drifted north, across the palmetto and scrub pine flats on the other side of the state road. I saw then that the blacktop was gone, and the right of way widened.

“We’re being improved around here,” he said in sour explanation. “Everything is going to be first-class. By and by.” He stared west, after the fading roar of the big earth movers. “Worries me the way they bucket through here. Janine should be on her way back from town by now, and there’s some bad places where she could meet up with them. She does more than her share of driving now that the school bus can’t come down here.”

“Why can’t it?”

“They can’t use roads that are officially closed, that’s why.” He looked toward his waterfront. “What’d you come in. You can’t get the Flush upriver in this tide.”

“Wasn’t there a good deep channel?”

“Until they did a lot of dredge and fill upriver. Now the first half mile from the bay up toward me is pretty bad. They say they’re going to scour it out, but they won’t say when.”

We walked out and I showed him the Muñequita . He knew that good honest T-Craft hull, the semi-V that Rodney Thompson makes in Titusville. When people from the Kansas flats get the marine fever, it is a dreadful addiction, and Tush had a bad case. He looked over the custom installation of the two dual-carb OMC’s and listened to my explanation of why I’d pulled the Chrysler-Volvos the original owner installed. He was intrigued by the special engineering of the Teleflex panel and control system.

I heard myself talking too much. Things were going well for me. And the world was a little sour for my friend Tush Bannon. In repose his broad, heavy, freckly face sagged. So when it happens like that, you talk too much. The small breeze stopped, and the October forenoon heat leaned hard, in that 90°–95 humidity that makes the sweat pop out.

So we went up to the motel and sat in the kitchen alcove under the rackety-clatter of an overworked little window air conditioner, drank beer while he said Janine was fine, the boys were fine, and we talked about who we’d heard from and who we hadn’t, and who was doing what. I stood by the window with the cold can in my hand and said, “What’s all the big industry over there, up river?”

“TTA,” he said with a tangible bitterness. “Tech-Tex Applications. A nice clean industry, except every now and then any fool fish that comes up the Shawana turns belly-up and floats back down. And sometimes there’s a funny little smell, sort of like ammonia, and the tears run down your face. But they employ four hundred people, Trav. Big tax base. They gave ’em the keys to the county to move in here.”

“But I thought this county had pretty fair zoning and pollution control and all that. I mean Broward Beach is a—”

“Don’t you know where you are, boy?” he asked. “You’re a good mile west of that county line. You are in Shawana County, Mister McGee. A garden spot. Go right over to Sunnydale, to the County Courthouse, and ever’ one of those happy, smiling five commissioners will tell you a man couldn’t pick a better spot to live and raise his kids and grow with the county.” He astonished me. I had never thought of Tush as being capable of irony. He was a big, amiable, beefy man, with mild blue eyes and stubbly pale lashes and brows, and a pink, peeling, permanent case of sunburn.