T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

He stared blearily down at the blistered boards of the dock and the tired sea churning beneath them. For a long moment he watched a drift of refuse jerking to and fro in the wash beneath the pilings and then he leaned forward to drop a ball of spit into the place where, he supposed, waxing philosophical, all spit had originated.

Spit to spit. The great sea. Thalassa, roll on. The water was gray here, transparent to a depth of three or four feet, imbued with a smell of fish gone bad. He spat again, watching transfixed as the glistening fluid, product of his own body, spiraled through the air to vanish in the foam. And what was spit, anyway? A secretion of the salivary glands, serving to moisten food — and women’s lips. His first wife — Andrea — didn’t like to kiss while they were having sex. She always turned her head away, as if lips had nothing to do with it. Cee Cee, who’d left him three weeks ago, had been different. In his wallet, imprisoned behind a layer of scratched plastic, was a picture of her, in profile, her chin elevated as if she were being stroked, her visible eye drooping with passion, the red blaze of a carnation tucked behind her ear like a heat gauge. He resisted the impulse to look at it.

Damian’s voice—“Yeah, man, that’s what I’m talking about, forti-fication!”—rang out behind him and Hunter turned to see him tapping his Styrofoam cup to those of a couple in matching windbreakers, toasting them, as if there were anything to celebrate at this hour and in this place. Damian had a flask with him. Hunter had already been the recipient of a judicious shot of brandy — not gin, thank god — and he presumed Damian was sharing the wealth.

The woman — she was small-boned, dark, with her hair wrapped like a muffler round her throat — looked shy and sweet as she sipped her infused coffee and blinked her eyes against the burn of it. In the next moment, Damian had escorted the couple over to the rail and was making introductions. “Hey, Hunt, you ready for another?” he said, and Hunter held out his cup, hoping to deaden the pain, and then they were all four tapping the rims of the spongy white cups one against the other as if they were crystal flutes of Perrier-Jouet.

“This is Ilta’s maiden voyage, can you believe it?” Damian crowed, his voice too loud, so that people had begun to stare at him.

“This is correct,” she said in a small voice animated by the occasion, and, he supposed, the brandy. “I do it for Mock.” And here she looked to the man in the matching windbreaker, whose name seemed to be either Mack or Mark, Hunter couldn’t be sure.

“I’m a regular,” the man said, grinning as he tipped back his cup and then held it up for Damian to refresh, “but my wife’s never been out.” He looked harmless enough, one of those ubiquitous, fleshy-faced, pants-straining, good-time boys in his forties who probably sat behind a computer live days a week and dreamed in gigabytes, but Hunter would have killed him in a minute for the wife, whom he clearly didn’t deserve. She was a jewel, that was what she was, and that accent — what was it? Swedish? “She eats the fish, though,” Mack or Mark went on. He gave her a good-natured leer.

“Don’t you, dumpling?”

“Who doesn’t?” Damian put in, just to say something. He was the type who needed to be at the center of things, the impresario, the star of all proceedings, and that could be charming — Hunter loved him, he did — but it could be wearing too. “I mean, fresh fish, fresh from the sea like you never get it in the store?” He paused to tip the flask over the man’s cup. “I mean, come on, Ilta, what took you so long?”

“I do not like the, what do you say? The rocking.” She made an undulating motion with her hands. “Of this boat.”

They all looked to the boat. It was big enough, a typical party boat, seventy, eighty feet long, painted a crisp white and so immovable it might have been nailed to the dock. In that moment Hunter realized he hadn’t taken his Dramamine — the label advised taking two tablets half an hour to an hour before setting out — and felt in his jeans pocket for the package. His throat was dry. His head ached. He was wondering if the little white pills would have any effect if he took them now, or if they worked at all no matter when you took them, remembering the last time he’d been talked into this particular sort of adventure and the unrelenting misery he’d experienced for the entire six and a half hours of the trip (“There’s nothing more enjoyable — and tender, tender too — than seeing somebody you really admire puking over the rail,” Damian had kept saying). The memory ran a hot wire through him and before he could think he had the package out and was shaking four pills into the palm of his hand and offering them to Ilta. “Want a couple of these?” he asked. “Dramamine? You know, for motion sickness?” He pantomimed the act of gagging.

“We gave her the patch,” the husband said.

Ilta waved a finger back and forth, as if scolding Hunter. “I do it for Mock,” she repeated. “For the anniversary. We are married today three years ago.”

Hunter shrugged, cupped his palm to his mouth and threw back all four pills, figuring the double dose had to do something for him.

“In Helsinki,” the husband put in, his face lit with the blandest smile of possession and satisfaction. He put an arm around his wife and drew her to him. They kissed. The gulls squalled overhead.

Hunter looked away. And then suddenly everyone snapped to attention as the other woman — the deckhand in waiting — pulled back the bar to the gangplank. It was then, just as they’d begun to fumble around for their gear, that the man with the spider tattoo thrust himself into the conversation. Hunter had noticed him earlier — when they were in the office paying for their tickets and renting rods and tackle and whatnot. He was a crazy, you could see that from across the room, everything about him wired tight, his hair shaved down to a black bristle, his eyes like tracers, the tattoo of a red-and-black spider — or maybe it was a scorpion — climbing up the side of his neck. “Hey,” he said now, pushing past Ilta, “can I get in on this party?” And he held out his cup.

Damian never flinched. That was his way. Mr. Cool. “Sure, man,” he said, “just give me your cup.”

In the next moment they were shuffling forward to the reek of diesel as the captain fired up his engines and the boat shivered beneath them. Everything smelled of long use, fishermen here yesterday and fishermen coming tomorrow. The decks were wet, the seats damp with dew. Fish scales, opalescent, dried to a crust, crunched underfoot. They found a place in the cabin, room for four at one of the tables lined up there cafeteria style, and the spider man, aced out, made his way to the galley. Hunter had a moment to think about Cee Cee, how she would have hated this — she was a downtown girl, absolutely, at home in the mall, the restaurant and the movie theater and nowhere else — and then there was a lurch, the boat slipped free of the dock and beyond the salt-streaked windows the shore broadened and dipped, and very slowly fell away into the mist.

It was an hour and a half out to the fishing grounds. Hunter settled in gingerly, his stomach in freefall, the coffee a mistake, the brandy compounding that mistake and the Dramamine a dissolve of pure nothing, not even worthy of a placebo effect. It wasn’t as if it was rough — or as rough as it might have been. This was June, when the Santa Barbara Channel was entombed in a vault of fog that sometimes didn’t burn off till two or three in the afternoon — June Gloom, was what they called it in the newspaper — and as far as he knew the seas were relatively calm. Still, the boat kept humping over the waves like a toboggan slamming through the moguls at the bottom of a run and the incessant dip and rise wasn’t doing him any good. He glanced round him. No one else seemed much affected, the husband and wife playing cards, Damian ordering up breakfast in the galley at the front of the cabin, the others snoozing, reading the paper, scooping up their eggs over easy as if they were in a diner somewhere on upper State Street, miles from the ocean. After a while, he cradled his arms on the tabletop, put his head down and tumbled into a dark shaft of sleep.