The Starboard Sea: A Novel (16 page)

Once the cookie tin was empty, Chester rubbed his eyes, “You still think I’m, what’s the word you used? Abrasive?” Chester laughed. “Where’d you get a word like that? From your grandma?”

It was Cal’s word. He’d used it in all of his nonsense sentences, but he’d also used it to describe my skin after a week without shaving. He’d rubbed his hands against my cheek and told me he liked how the roughness felt against his own skin. Weeks later, he’d used the same word to describe how cruel I’d become.

“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Chester got up to leave, and I was sad to see him go. Though I’d done little in all these months to reach out for any sort of friendship, though I didn’t deserve access to his mother’s recipes and care, Chester had gone out of his way to make everything comfortable between us, easy, even. I wasn’t sure how to show my gratitude.

“Thank you,” I said.
“Do you hear that?” Chester asked.
The weather had gone quiet. I ran over to the fire escape, threw

open the window, and motioned for Chester to climb out onto the wet railing. The breeze outside was calm, the rain had stopped, and the air smelled cleanly of night.

“Is it over?” Chester asked.
“No. It’s the eye. We’re right in the center of the storm.”

NINE

Sunday morning I slept late. When I finally woke, my head felt like someone had wrapped a thick, wet flannel blanket around my skull and squeezed tightly. My body achy, my mouth cottony, my sheets and skin itchy from cookie crumbs. The bed was littered with empty whiskey bottles, and I lurched over to my bureau to hide the evidence. I flipped a light switch. Nothing happened. The power was still out.

Opening my windows, I could tell that it was a brilliant day. Hot and sunny as though the storm had scrubbed the sky a deep blue, washing away the clouds, carrying off the seabirds. I left Whitehall curious to survey the storm damage, hoping I’d run into Aidan.

The ground floor of the dorm was flooded with several inches of standing water. I slipped off my shoes, rolled up my khakis, and sloshed through.

Outside, the storm surge had pushed the ocean up beyond the seawall and onto campus. The waters had yet to recede. A moat of rain and ocean puddled around the dorm. I kept my shoes off as I waded into the swampy lake. A school of thin speckled fish, probably cod, floated belly up on the surface. Similar moats of standing water encircled nearly all of the buildings along the harbor. Poseidon had struck his trident, summoning his flood, turning Bellingham into a temporary Atlantis. The destruction blatant and impressive.

By the Athletic Center a grove of pitch pines had dominoed across the parking lot, obstructing entry to the gym. A once soaring silver oak had timbered, crushing a fleet of sports vans. Swirling winds must have sheared off the top of a red cedar, leaving just a few branches of juniper needles. The rickety roof of the Old Boathouse had survived and still proudly exclaimed class of ’88, but the Barracuda had lost its sharpest glass-and-metal fin. The glass reduced to shards and the steel frame twisted as though a shark had taken a bite out of our Barracuda. Everywhere I looked I saw shingles, roof tarpaper, windscreens, leaves, and debris. What I thought were dozens of trash bags scattered across the road turned out to be knotted clumps of brown seaweed. No one had bothered to take down the American flag and the canvas flapped, its frayed edges in tatters, the flagpole bent several degrees off its foundation.

Saddest of all, the Swan, Aidan’s and my hideout, had been driven hard against the seawall. The storm surge had smashed the baby yacht, towing it wildly along the embankment, ripping a large gash in its red hull. A pile-up of lesser yachts had pinned the Swan against the seawall, forcing the Swan upright, vertical on its transom. A whale at the summit of its breach.

I figured that the dining hall might be closed for business, but I knew the school had to find a way to feed us. I jogged over to Astor to check things out. The closer I got, the more noise I heard. Someone in Wee House, the boys’ freshman and sophomore dorm, had propped a boom box inside an open window and was using all of its battery power to blast Bob Marley’s
Legend.
The groove for “Could You Be Loved” started up:
“Don’t let them fool ya, or even try to school ya.”
Cal had this theory that all dorm room windows were programmed to play Bob Marley’s greatest hits.

The front lawn of Astor had been staged as a kind of storm relief center. Cafeteria workers grilled hot dogs and burgers on an assembly line of outdoor grills while students waited to be fed. It looked a little like a carnival set in the middle of a catastrophe. Raleigh Windsor bustled around in boat shoes barking orders at anyone who would listen. Four gleaming black armored bulldozers stood at the ready, yazid yazid tractor decaled in red letters with golden Arabic scrawled underneath. Prince Yaz held court in the open cab of a minidozer showing Brizzey and Nadia the controls. Across the street at the headmaster’s house, a pair of large striving elms had uprooted much of the lawn, revealing a complex, gnarled root system. Yazid’s machinery was about to come in handy.

I shouted up to Yazid, “You know how to work that thing?” He waved back. “I’m dangerous with a lorry.”
On my way to grab some food, it occurred to me that I should ask

Nadia to hunt down Aidan. Though rules were pretty lax at Bellingham, for a guy it wasn’t always easy to see a girl right when you wanted to see her. With Aidan I’d come to rely on habit and prearrangement. In daylight, I couldn’t just saunter up to her room, but I could put out the word that I hoped to meet up with her.

I went back and motioned for Nadia to climb down from the tractor’s cab. Brizzey smacked her lips and asked, “Why so bossy?”
I ignored her.
Nadia’s hair fell over her face in stringy bangs—a failed attempt to conceal a blister of acne on her forehead. She had on cutoff jeans and a red-and-white-checkered cowboy shirt, the kind with snaps, the kind that could be flashed open with the flick of a wrist. We hadn’t really spoken since her drunken night and I wasn’t even sure how much she remembered. She looked up at me expectant, smudges of black eyeliner drawn under her lids. Brizzey had the same thick lines drawn under her own eyes.
“Do me a favor, when you go upstairs,” I said. “Tell Aidan I want to see her.”
Nadia blinked. In her Southern drawl she said, “But I’m right here. Don’t you want to see me?”
I guessed that Nadia was attempting to flirt with me. The ends of her shirt were tied in a knot at her waist and I could see the milky skin of her belly. “I’m like better now,” she said.
I wasn’t sure what Nadia meant or how I was supposed to respond.
She fixed her bangs, flattening the hair over her forehead, covering her zits. “I can hold my liquor a lot better. Peach schnapps and orange juice, that’s my new drink. Just thought you should know.” Nadia swung back up onto the bulldozer full of bluster.
She’d clearly been studying Brizzey. There must have been a lot of pressure for the girls at Bellingham to pigeonhole themselves. To be the smart girl or the slutty girl or the girl who could hold her liquor. To remake oneself in other people’s image, trying on new masks just to see if they fit.

The cafeteria had emptied its refrigerators. Sausages, burgers, and chicken breasts sizzled on the barbecue grills, white coals smoking from the grease. Bowls of pasta salads sweated in the sun. The day was turning into a street fair. I ate a cheeseburger while waiting on line for something to drink. Leo, whom I no longer thought of as Plague, busied himself refilling carafes of red bug juice. I smiled and nodded and was surprised when he turned his back and ignored me. Leo must have thought twice about his snub, because as I walked away with my drink and lunch, I heard him shout my name.

“Jason,” he said, running after me. “Got a question for you.”

Just as I turned to speak with Leo, Tazewell, his eyes pink, his hair a dreadlocked mess of shaggy blond, appeared at my side. He looked like a Viking with a hangover. Taze snapped his fingers and told Leo to fuck off. I nodded to Leo, hoping he’d understand. Trading one snub for another.

Tazewell wore a tight blue R.E.M. concert T-shirt. I could hear Michael Stipe’s plaintive wail. Stipe sang like a man in need of someone’s arms around him.

I said, “I’m impressed you like those guys.”
“My favorite band,” Taze said. “Have you heard their new album?

Fucking inspired.” Tazewell promised to play some songs for me later. Kriffo stumbled by in a large white tent of a shirt with the ques
tion, who’s that girl? printed on his chest in purple pastel script.
Before I had a chance to ask, Kriffo explained in his soft voice, “My
housekeeper went to a Madonna concert. As a joke, I told her to get
me a T-shirt. Had to pay her sixty bucks for this thing.”
“Guess the joke was on you.” I said.
“We should go see the Butthole Surfers,” Tazewell said. “We’ll buy a
T-shirt for your housekeeper and make her pony up some cash.” Tazewell snatched the burger from my plate. “We’ve been deputized.” He
took a bite, chewing and speaking. “Jason, you want to go play hero?” Raleigh Windsor, in his reckless wisdom, had decided that it would be okay to allow Yazid to tool around campus in his father’s shiny black
machine. Tazewell wanted to join in the fun and asked to ride along. “Why don’t you boys help clean up some of this debris.” Windsor
ordered the groundskeepers to use the other tractors but gave Yazid
the green light to help out any way he saw fit.
Yazid didn’t have the requisite skills for operating the tractor’s controls, but it didn’t stop him from driving all of us over to the Athletic
Center. Taze, Kriffo, and I rode on the footboard of the tractor, balancing and holding on like we were circus acrobats. We set our sights
on removing the pitch pines from in front of the blocked entrance.
Yazid had a clawlike device on the back of his tractor, a “ripper,” he
called it, and demonstrated how it worked, attacking the trees, shoveling them off the ground and piling them over onto the middle of the
parking lot, digging up the asphalt in the pro cess. When it was my
turn, I sat up in the dozer’s bucket seat, the open cab rumbling and
bucking as I practiced shifting backward and forward, then finally
pushing the blade on the bulldozer through the needles and branches,
the gasoline exhaust mixing with the fresh fragrance of pine. Once
the entrance was unblocked, Tazewell disappeared inside the Athletic
Center.
Since there wasn’t much room on Yazid’s bulldozer, Stuyvie had
been forced to drive over in a green golf cart. He had on a Bellingham
polo shirt and was pretending to be in charge. “We can’t just leave the
trees in the parking lot.” Stuyvie stood with his hands on his hips.
“Windsor wouldn’t like it and neither would my dad.”
Yazid and Kriffo jumped off the bulldozer. Stuyvie had turned
their fun into a chore. Yazid and Kriffo weren’t interested in actual
manual labor. Playing with the dozers ceased being fun.
The Athletic Center’s double doors flashed open and Tazewell
busted through dressed in a vintage leather football helmet and shoulder pads. I recognized the gear from one of the trophy cases that lined the
gym’s hallway. The helmet and pads had been worn in some long-ago
Bellingham championship. Tazewell tossed an old pigskin in the air. “Enough with the groundskeeping. Let’s play hurricane ball.” Taze snapped the football to Kriffo, then led us all into the dark Athletic
Center.
Light streamed in from the high windows. The building smelled
of bleach and ripe teenage bodies. I felt the wreckage of sharp broken
glass under my feet.
“Found these cases smashed,” Tazewell said. “The wind pressure
from the storm must have done it. Might as well take advantage.” Several trophy cases had been shattered open. Silver bowls and
bronze cups tipped on their sides. The wind an unlikely perpetrator. I
imagined Taze was probably to blame.
The trophy cases held retired jerseys from nearly every decade.
Taze wanted to play football but he didn’t want to get his R.E.M.
T-shirt dirty. He was too lazy to walk back to the dorm and change.
“Pick out your own gear,” Taze ordered.
Once dressed, we looked like a time line of football history. Tazewell modeled an old-school Walter Camp lace-up blouse. Kriffo was
all Knute Rockne in his knitted wool sweater, a gold Bellingham “B”
budding on his chest. Short and stocky, every shirt Stuyvie put on was
too big. “You look like that Hail Mary midget, Doug Flutie,” Kriffo
snarked. Though he claimed never to have seen a game, Yazid donned
a classic maroon silk jersey and threw perfect spirals channeling the
golden arm of Johnny Unitas. And me, in my polyester vest, I wanted
to be Joe Montana talking trash and delivering the goods. Back outside, Tazewell split us up into teams. “Me and Kriffo against
Jason and Yazid.”
“What about me?” Stuyvie asked.
I noticed that Stuyvie had a trail of scratches along his left cheek, as
though a cat had swiped his face.
“You can referee.” Kriffo laughed.
“Touch or tackle?” Stuyvie asked. “What are the rules?” “There are no rules.”
That about summed up our afternoon. Our friendly game of touch
turned quickly into a high- stakes war of tackle. The four of us carved
up the wet turf into rough zigzagged furrows, doing more damage than
any storm could have imagined. We played full force, drilling the ball, talking smack, shouting “ass clown” and “d-bag.” Every time Stuyvie
made a call against us, Yazid instructed Stuyvie to “Unfuck yourself.” “What does that even mean?” Stuyvie finally asked.
“Americans are born stupid,” Yazid said. “You tell one another to
go fuck yourselves like that’s a bad thing. Most people enjoy fucking
themselves.”
“I dig it,” Tazewell said. “But then I have dual citizenship.” Though all of us were primed to unfuck one another, it turned out
that hurricane ball was my game. After making the first touchdown
for either side, I fielded an interception and scored once again. When
Kriffo finally caught a pass and raced toward the goal line, I galloped
toward him, dove, and grabbed his knees. The giant fell, blasting the
earth, spraying mud. For just a brief moment, I held Kriffo’s legs, warm
and pulsing beneath me. Felt my strength connected to his defeat. “Prosper nailed you,” Stuyvie hooted. “I’ve never seen anyone take
the Big Man down.”
That was all Kriffo needed to hear. He stayed on me for the rest of
the game. Bearing down. Riding me hard. Throwing elbows and stiff
arms, taunting me in his little-girl voice. Calling me his bitch. I told
him that I dreamed about being his bitch, then sprinted down the
field, jumped up, and cradled one of Yazid’s long bombs. I was faster
than Kriffo. He couldn’t catch me, couldn’t tackle me.
Tazewell decided to cover me instead. I ran a bootleg on a fake to
Yazid only to have Taze blitz. Hoping to save the play, I tossed a lateral to Prince Yaz right before Taze swept my legs, sending me flying.
As I landed on my back, my jaw snapped down and I bit my tongue.
The blood salty in my mouth. For a moment, I couldn’t feel my arms. I stayed on the grass, spitting blood, until Kriffo came over and offered me his hand. He pulled me up, then reached down and tapped
my sack. I doubled over. “Just making sure you didn’t lose your balls.”
Kriffo smiled.
I smiled back.
When Riegel claimed that there had been rumors about Cal and
me, I began to fear for my future. I was afraid that Tazewell had heard
the gossip and was waiting to spring some charge or accusation. The minute Kriffo swatted my balls, I stopped worrying. There was no way someone like Kriffo would touch another guy if he suspected the
dude was anything other than straight.
It was always weird to me that guys played grab ass or snapped
towels in the shower as a way of saying hello. Tapping testicles struck
me as just plain creepy. But here was the funny thing: Right after Kriffo
helped me to my feet, I noticed a bulge in his shorts. Kriffo had an
erection. Watching Tazewell tackle me had done something to him.
Though I briefly considered taunting him, no one said a word as Kriffo
reached down into his pants to calm his excitement.
Finally Yazid broke the silence and asked, “Who’s winning?”