T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

When he woke, it was to the decelerating rhythm of the engines and a pulse of activity that rang through the cabin like a fire alarm.

Everybody was rising en masse and filing through the doors to the deck. They’d arrived. He felt a hand on his shoulder and lifted his head to see Damian looming over him. “You have a nice sleep?”

“I dreamed I was in hell, the ninth circle, where there’s nothing moving but the devil.” The boat rolled on a long gentle swell. The engines died. “And maybe the sub-devils. With their pitchforks.”

The flask appeared. Damian pressed it to his lips a moment, then held it out in offering. “You want a hit?”

Hunter waved him away. He still hadn’t risen from his seat.

“Come on, man, this is it. The fish are waiting. Let’s go.”

There was a shout. People were backed up against the windows, clumsy with the welter of rods that waved round them like antennae.

Somebody had a fish already, a silver thrashing on the boards.

Despite himself, he felt a vestigial thrill steal over him. He got to his feet.

Damian was halfway to the door when he turned round. “I put our stuff out there in back on the port side — Mark said that was the best spot. Come on, come on.” He waved a hand impatiently and Hunter found his balance all at once — it was as if he’d done a backflip and landed miraculously on his feet. Just then the sun broke through and everything jumped with light. Damian went flat as a silhouette. The sea slapped the hull. Someone else cried out. “And wait’ll you get a load of Julie,” he said under his breath.

“Julie? Who’s Julie?”

The look Damian gave him was instructive, teacher to pupil.

After all, as Damian had it he’d come all the way down here for the weekend — for this trip, for last night and tonight too — to cheer up his old buddy, to get him out of the house and back among the living, waxing eloquent on the subject of Hunter’s failings into the small hours of the day that was just now beginning. “The deckhand, man. Where you been?”

“Sleeping.”

“Yeah, well maybe it’s time to wake up.”

And then they were out in the light and the world opened up all the way to the big dun humps of the islands before them — he’d never seen them so close — and back round again to the boat and its serried decks and the smell of open water and Julie, the deckhand, freshly made-up and divested of the shapeless yellow slicker she’d worn back at the dock, Julie, in a neon-orange bikini and sandals with thin silver straps that climbed up her bare ankles, waiting to help each and every sportsman to his bait.

So they fished. The captain, a dark presence behind the smoked glass of the bridge that loomed over them, let his will be known through the loudspeakers on deck. Drop your lines, he commanded, and they dropped their lines. Haul in, he said, and they hauled in while he revved the engines and motored to another spot and yet another. There were long stretches of boredom after the initial excitement had passed and Hunter had an abundance of time to reflect on how much he hated fishing. At long intervals, someone would connect, his rod bent double and a mackerel or a big gape-

Microsoft Word — Wild Child.docx

mouthed thing variously described as either a rockfish or a sheephead would flap in over the rail, but Hunter’s rod never bent or even twitched. Nor did Damian’s. Before the first hour was up, Damian had left his rod propped on the rail and drifted into the cabin, emerging ten minutes later with two burgers wrapped in waxed paper and two beers in plastic cups. Hunter was hunched over his knees on one of the gray metal lockers that held the life jackets and ran along both sides of the boat, his stomach in neutral, trying all over again to get used to the idea of lateral instability. He accepted the burger and the beer.

“This sucks,” Damian said, settling in beside him with a sigh.

Their rods rode up and down with the waves like flagpoles stripped of their flags.

“It was your idea.”

Damian gazed out across the water to where the smaller island, the one separated from the bigger by a channel still snarled in fog, seemed to swell and recede. “Yeah, but it’s a ritual, it’s manly. It’s what buddies do together, right? And look at it, look where we are — I mean is this beautiful or what.”

“You just said it sucks.”

“I mean this spot. Why doesn’t he move us already?” He jerked his head around to shoot a withering glare at the opaque glass of the bridge. “I mean, I haven’t caught shit — what about you? Any bites?”

Hunter was unwrapping the burger as if it were crystal, thinking he’d maybe nibble at it — he didn’t want to press his luck. He set it down and took the smallest sip of beer. In answer to Damian’s question, he just shrugged. Then, enunciating with care, he said,

“Fish are extinct.”

“Bullshit. This guy on the other side got a nice-sized calico, like eight or nine pounds, and they’re the best eating, you know that…”

He took a massive bite out of the hamburger, leaning forward to catch the juices in the waxed-paper wrapping. “Plus,” he added through the effort of chewing, “you better get on the stick if you want to win the pool.”

Hunter had been so set on simply enduring that he’d forgotten all about the pool or even the possibility of connecting, of feeling some other force, something dark and alien, pulling back at you from a place you couldn’t imagine. “What are you talking about?”

“The pool, remember? Everybody on the boat put in ten bucks when they gave you the bag with your number on it? You must really be out of it — you put in a twenty for both of us, remember, and I said I’d get the first round?”

“I’m not going to win anything.” He let out a breath and it was as if the air had been sucked out of his lungs.

Mostly, the night before, they’d talked about sex. How when you didn’t have it you were obsessed with it, how you came to need it more than food, more than money. “It’s the testosterone clogging your brain,” Damian had said, and Hunter, three weeks bereft, had nodded in agreement. “And I’ll tell you another thing,” Damian had added after a lengthy digression on the subject of his latest girlfriend’s proclivities, “once you have it, I’m talking like five minutes later, it’s like, ‘Hey, let’s go shoot some hoops.’” Now, because he couldn’t seem to resist it, because they were in college all over again, at least for the weekend, he said, “fust keep your rod stiff,

’cause you never know.”

And then Mark was there, in a pair of disc sunglasses and a baseball cap that clung like a beanie to his oversized head. He had his own burger in one hand and a beer in the other. The boat slipped into a trough and rose up again on a long debilitating swell. “Any luck?” he asked.

“Nada,” Damian said, his voice tuned to the pitch of complaint.

“The captain ought to move us. I mean with what we’re paying you’d think he’d work his fish-finding mojo just a little bit harder, wouldn’t you?”

Mark shrugged. “Give him time. I know the man. He can be a bit of a hardass, but if they’re out there he’ll find them. He always does. Or almost always.” He looked thoughtful, his lower face arranged around his chewing. “I mean, sometimes you get skunked.

It’s nature, you know, the great outdoors. Nobody can control that.”

“How about Ilta?” Hunter heard himself say. “She get any?”

Mark drew a face. “She’s not feeling so well, I guess. She’s in the head. Been in the head for the past fifteen minutes.”

“Green in the gills,” Damian said with a joyful grin, and Hunter felt his stomach clench around the tiniest morsel of burger and bun.