Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

“Master?” I asked, before NP beat me to it.

“It's a figure of speech.”

“We better get paid for a whole shift,” NP said.

“I'm sure you'll get your $8.35,” Bert said, to our general contentment. Like I said, the money added up.

We cleaned up what we could. Special blackout procedures called for us to lay down garbage bags on top of the open containers in the vats, to add another layer of insulation. Keep the cold inside where it belonged. Bert double-checked the bags when we were done, tucking their edges down tight. “He's going to freak if he comes in tomorrow and all this is melted,” he said.

I was wiping down the waffle apparatus when the door started rattling. “We're closed, damn it, shit,” I said.

“Let me in, fool!”

It was the other cousin, Marsha. “You guys got off lucky,” she said when I opened the door. She'd come to fetch Meg. She and her date, and one of her date's buddies, were waiting outside.

“Hey Bert, can I go?” Meg asked. She rearranged the slash of hair across her face, but given the lighting conditions, her lazy eye wasn't going to be an issue that night. There was a moment in the dark when I had pictured her giving me a ride home (had she driven to work? I didn't know) and then various things occurring. She grabbed her bag and was gone. “See you later!”

Soon the rest of us were out on the wharf. The wind cooled the sweat that had soaked into our Jonni Waffle T-shirts. Folks were drinking beer and looking at the stars. The people on the boats had their radios up loud, the mandatory Motown faves from The Big Chill soundtrack overlapping each other in the night. A few yards away, the windows of the Long Wharf Restaurant glowed from the tiny candles on the tables. Bert said he was going to head to the Corner Bar. His friend was bartending. It wasn't the first blackout night he'd spent there. Nick went over to the Long Wharf Restaurant to see when Randy was getting off. Maybe we could get a ride home or maybe there was a plan brewing.

NP cursed. “Yo, Bert, can I get the key? I left my pint in there.” He disappeared into the Promenade with the keys. I was surprised that Bert just tossed him the keys. Of course NP wasn't going to steal anything, but I was always surprised by these little trusting gestures from white people in authority. Like when Gabe went outside the Tuck Shop for a smoke, full of faith in our character. I shouldn't have been surprised. We had earned it by being good boys. And look at Gabe now.

NP returned. I said, “Damn, I forgot my mix tape! Can I go and get it?”

Bert shook his head and handed me the keys. “Hurry up, man. I need a goddamn beer.”

I can't explain what happened. I can only tell you, the best I am able, about how I used to live.

Mix tapes were the perfect alibi. All of us in the teenage crew had them, they were a snapshot of this month's soul translated into music and arranged in perfect order. We let everything else go but we were fascists about our mix tapes. They were our necessary evidence. We took turns, sticking them into Nick's radio when it was our go, to make somebody listen finally. I had a fall guy in NP, who by his own admission had returned to the freezer to retrieve his pint. I unlocked the front door and stood before the mammoth freezer. You had to really pull hard on the freezer doors. They were designed to stay shut and make a strong seal. I pulled them open and the cool air tumbled over my face. I couldn't see it, but I pictured the white mist in the darkness spilling out in chilly, ghostly tendrils. The heat and humidity reached inside, brushing their fingertips along the side of the cans and transforming the frost there into beads of water. It was an exchange, the outside coming inside and the inside entering outside, like a tiny darkness that grew and then spread to cover whole towns. I left the doors open, first at a ten-degree angle, then a twenty-five-degree angle. Like that.

I gave the keys back to Bert. He slapped us five and padded over to the Corner Bar, the headlights of the creeping cars lighting his way. At the intersection, a cop waved a glowing red cone around and around. Nick had some Budweisers in his hands, a bribe from Randy for us to wait until he finished his shift. I was tired and I smelled and I decided to go home.

It was so different walking home without streetlights, especially once I got past the marina, where people had their boats lit up and were having a high old time, drinking and laughing. Surely the young ladies at the Cormaria Retreat House were dancing with their candelabra under the stars with extra passion tonight. The farther I got from town the darker it got and there were fewer cars slowly nudging their way through the dark to light my path. The rain still hadn't come, but the wind fussed the trees and this was the only sound I heard. The candles and kerosene lanterns burned in the windows of the houses, pulsating in orange and yellow, showing the way, just as they had a hundred years ago. I couldn't see the power lines and telephone and cable wires and I couldn't make out the fancy cars in the driveways. Events had pulled the plug on the modern world. As if it had never been. The lights in the windows of the familiar old houses had guided the men home when they returned from sea, the earthbound constellations they recognized and trusted and steered by. I knew where I was. I had walked these streets my whole life. For a few minutes I was a true son of Eastville, returning with my brothers in the dark down Bay Street and Hempstead Street after a good day's work.

The lights were on when I woke up the next morning. The rain never made it. Reggie and I spent the afternoon cleaning up the house, undoing the mess of our days. Our parents arrived that evening and it all started again.

I didn't work that weekend — Nick had asked for my Saturday night shift to help pay off his gold — and when I came in Monday there was no mention of the open freezer and the ice cream inside, solid or otherwise. I didn't ask about it. Jonni Waffle was a family, and my experience of family was that you didn't ask too many questions. A few days later, on the wall above the desk in the back of the store, Martine taped up a sheet with a list of Blackout Rules, the last of which was: double-CHECK THAT THE FREEZER DOORS ARE SHUT! The following summer, the list was still there, and next to it was a picture of Martine and his brother, taken at a family reunion “back home,” or so he told us. They had their arms crooked around each other's necks and cups of pale beer in their hands. They looked a lot alike in the face and had the same smile. If you disbelieved what people told you, all you had to do was look at the smile. His brother was black as hell, no joke, with a crazy crown of kink on his head.

The Coca-Cola Company brought back Coke — now called Classic Coke — soon after the blackout, on July 10, 1985.

I worked at Jonni Waffle for another two summers, eating ice cream all shift, every shift. The smell of the batter haunts me still. My metabolism was such that I never got fat, but eventually my gorging turned into a form of aversion therapy and made me hate ice cream, the very sight of it, and this hatred spread to the entire dessert world, and most sweets. It's a terrible thing to hate dessert, to remove yourself from the ways of civilized people. You learn to see things differently from the other side, standing there behind the protective plastic, looking at the normals and their easy pleasure in simple things.

From time to time, I think of the freezer and have a vision of the catastrophe. As the night grows long, the containers at the bottom of the pile start to buckle under their burden. What is inside has gone soft and weak. The bottom cans collapse under the weight of their brothers and the ones up high tumble out of the freezer, knocking the doors wide, the lids of the cans popping off. The cans splash out their guts, one after the other. It's dark, and no one can see it but me, I can see it, the rainbow calamity on the tile, the green mint and bloodred sherbet and other assorted plenty in a cookie-clotted sludge oozing out across the floor, marshmallows floating like broken teeth, all this in a slow and ugly wave, reaching toward me like a hand.