Follow the Sun. Edward J. Delaney
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the copy editors, feeling as if he’d just gotten there.
The knock now at his door is too soft to be Quinn’s, whom he assumes to still be sleeping long hours over in his flop. The second knock is even softer now, apologetic if a knock on a door can be so. He opens up a crack, and sees it’s Tina, his niece.
“Hang on a minute,” he calls through.
“Okay,” comes her voice, so softened it’s nearly a wraith.
He goes to the bedroom and pulls on his pants and zips up. Back to the door, she’s still standing there with the same face when he opens it.
“What’s wrong?” he says.
“Nothing, at least not urgently,” she says, as he motions her inside.
“You keep the place clean,” she says.
“That’s such a surprise?”
“I guess I don’t expect that from men. How’s your daughter?”
“Sarah . . .”
“Right, I knew that. How old is she now?”
“She’s seven now. She’s good, very good. She’ll be staying with me next weekend.”
They stand, looking at each other in an awkward interlude.
“So what can I do for you?” he says, knowing it’s come out sounding all wrong.
“It’s about my dad.”
“What else could it have been?” he says.
“My mom’s been trying to get the money from him.”
“I need to stay out of their issues,” Robbie says.
“I’m completely aware.”
He turns to the counter to retrieve his coffee. “So what do you need from me, then?”
“This is even more awkward than I thought it would be.”
Robbie motions for her to sit.
“I think you know I graduate high school in June,” she says.
“Of course,” he says, still surprised.
“I want to go to school in the fall. Just community college. I just need a little money. A loan. Just a little to make it work.”
“So why aren’t you talking to him?” Robbie says.
“When have I ever been able to talk to him?”
“He’s getting better.”
“I haven’t really talked to him since before he went to prison. That was sort of the end of things. I was only wondering if you might say something.”
“I’ll try.”
“Meaning you really won’t?”
“Meaning I’ll try.”
“My mother says she could get him thrown in jail.”
“Your mother knows that would only cost her more money. She pays a lawyer to stick him in jail, he loses the new boat, that’s the end of any more money.”
“I’m just saying,” she says.
“He’s trying, honey,” Robbie says. “The man is working his ass off, trust me on that, but the money just isn’t coming in. The going rate on lobster is what it is. And trust me that he isn’t living it up, either. He’s just getting by.”
“Family Court has a formula.”
“Family Court doesn’t go a hundred miles out into the ocean, in the winter, trying to survive. Family Court doesn’t control the market price for lobster.”
She appears to sit in her own thoughts now.
“You should talk to your father,” Robbie says. “Just to talk.”
Tina pushes off from the kitchen table, and stands.
“That’s something I’d have to work up to,” she says.
4.
QUINN STANDS AT HIS BATHROOM SINK AND COUGHS, a deep liquid hacking that barely dislodges the muck and makes the heart leap as if from starting blocks. It’s early afternoon now; his lungs feel full of water. He tests the leaden resistance of the legs, the burn in back and the shoulders; his seaward timetable is usually set by their sluggish recovery, and only secondarily by the weather. He isn’t hung over; beer does nothing at all to him anymore. Not after all the harder stuff, the heroin and coke and speed that he calibrated as if a technician, dialing in his ups and downs. Those were the days of deciding, pharmacologically, when to work sixty-six straight hours, then when to sleep like a dead man. When to punch the needle through the skin and let the happiness roll in like a fog, misting the landscape of his troubles. The heroin had seemed like love when he had first come to it. When he tried to get out it was yet another bad match, something to shut up, to put at bay.
He has no food, no coffee or milk or orange juice, so he drinks from the kitchen faucet with the cup of his hand. He’ll dress and go to find food, soon. But the envelope, as yet unsealed, lies on the counter, with the familiar handwriting, Quinn in that loopy, overdone hand that already speaks to him like indictment.
It’s not a letter as much as a balance sheet.
Quinn—
Balance on missed child support is 4,000
Interest is now about 7,000
That’s $11,000.
WTF?
—G
Interest! Gina’s usurious rates, set independent of any jurisdiction. She hasn’t gone to court on it, and she clearly thinks he should be thankful. But after standing at the docks last night receiving his payout, he knew that he was screwed, after the catch-up mechanical work on the boat, paying the inept crew, and buying fuel and supplies. He will pay the money out for his daughter, all of it. He just doesn’t know when.
He knows he won’t sleep more and if he can’t sleep he may has well get back out there, if he can rope a crew. That’s the hardest part, finding guys too young or too down on their fortunes to pass on the obvious misery this living tends to be. The absence of the drugs not only means he can’t mask the fatigue, neither can he mask the reality. It’s been two years like this.
He came off heroin in the most inadvisable way, his way. He was trying to be a man about it. He simply got on his boat absent the required substance, and pushed headlong out toward the horizon. Heroin had become not just the way to come home; he had for some time brought his kit out to sea, unable to concentrate without the fix. He was burning through his profits and the needle tracks were becoming obvious on his arms. So, one day, he simply fled his abuses, putting himself in the middle of two powerful-but-opposing negatives: to not go forward without his fix, and then to not succumb and turn the boat around without a hold full of bugs. But he had still loaded up the coke, on the premise of one battle at a time.
He started puking two hours out, to the consternation of his two-man crew. They were new, and understandably worried about sailing with an apparently seasick skipper. The cramps bent him over, and the shits kept him running below. Out fifty miles, the bad waters came up with the winds and he felt he could barely stand. But the work went on and on.
He tried to think only of finding some peace. That was the new preoccupation for him, as he pushed forty. He’d been in hand-to-hand combat with Peace since he was a kid. Now he was ready to taste it, to take it on as a new substance of choice, to be consumed and ridden. He’d pretty well screwed up almost everything, starting at fifteen. His last year of high school he was “the kid who had a kid,” as his father dolefully lectured him nightly about the responsibilities he had, up to now, continued