47
Arctura hung in the cobalt predawn as a last lantern of silver light. Andy’s snoring from the vee berth was the only distraction to the stillness. Mitchell hadn’t slept, he had listened through the open companionway to the music from the nightclub until it closed. Then to the people going home, their farewells, the laughing and cheerfulness in their voices. It woke him to wondering why he had never become happy with himself, with his aloneness, and an acceptance of the fact that life for him had disappeared completely from the ordinary. He couldn’t remember the last time he was in another person’s home. Back when he was a kid he guessed, with friends, or stopping at a neighbor’s house. All those stairs. And time. So much time.
Sadness can be chased away like young girls but this pain had muscle and a man’s weight. All those years to get back to a place I know spit about he thought. I read a book then forgot the lesson: Know how to get where you’re going. Like life itself. That’s where I’ve failed. Everything I’ve done has been a half-assed attempt, every lesson learned the hard way. Did I bring it on myself? Do I have the power to write my life as a tragedy? That’s the weight, the hard-borne weight. How did I make so many misjudgements? Or are some of us just fodder for those who are truly worthy?
He wondered where his father was and what it would have been like to lean on him. He had always given the man the benefit of his genius, his ability to have an idea and then create it with his calloused hands. His father had designed and created the machinery to build other machines. On school vacation days when Mitchell went with him to his shop they had spent more than a few lunch hours with corporate executives. Self-made men. Expensive suits, expensive cigars. Mitchell’s father called them by their first names and they did the same. The executives paid the tabs for the lunches and the drinks and they always said thank you.
If he’s still alive his eyes are probably too old to sit all night at a drafting table to blueprint his concepts Mitchell thought. I doubt he could hunt a buck all day then find its track in the morning, but he’s probably still a good fisherman.
Mitchell had lived in the fury of his father’s alcoholic rages. Until his bowel movements were sharp as nails. Then one night he walked away, from his father and mother and the land and all that he knew. Drifting day and night for weeks, hitching rides, he worked odd jobs and learned firsthand about the perverse brutality of men. He slept only a little and he kept moving.
Badly beaten from the road he found work finally in a summer resort and then in the factory in a city along the coast, until he was of an age to go to sea, the only place the horizon was still visible. What would it have been like he wondered, to have a reliable teacher with knowledgeable lessons about forethought and planning, about growth and maturity? It would have been different.
And now I’m back he thought. Or I was, until I got myself lashed to this dock. What an asshole I am. I haven’t learned a thing. I can’t wreck a boat and laugh it off. Neither could Mac. Now there’s an asshole. But I envy him. Not him really, the shack on the pier in this place, this harbor.
Symbols? Is that what I need, validation? Some affirmation of manhood? Bullshit. Success, maybe?...