Night Blues

I had just turned sixteen when I started walking down to the docks at night to see my brother, who worked as a mate on one of the deep-sea fishing boats. There were no streetlamps on those roads, and the reeds along the bay rustled constantly. Crossing the bridge served as a threshold—on one side I was a kid who had just snuck out, and on the other I was someone simply out late at night. The marina lay just on that other side. From the acme of the bridge, I spotted Jack’s Mustang in the near-empty parking lot. The walkway was diamond-patterned steel grating, and no matter the weather, the water beneath the bridge was never still at night. Never anything but purple and turbulent, gnashing and swirling and angry.

When I arrived at the slip, the Nighthawk was already shut down and dark. Dense, hazy air. A single amber bulb glowed above the cutting table. There stood Paulie, first mate, straight-backed as a priest, filleting bluefish with broad, masterful strokes. He dropped the fillets into a cooler near his feet. I took in the rhythmic knock and scrape of the knife against the table, then interrupted with the sort of modulated annoyance that only those at the tail end of puberty can furnish. “Jack around?”

Paulie stopped and looked up, not surprised at all to see me. “He’s over on the Eagle with Dugan.” Dugan was the first mate on The Golden Eagle, the longest boat in the marina at one hundred and three feet. Paulie lowered his head and continued to cut. “I think he owes that ass-wipe money,” he said.

The Eagle was moored three slips down from The Nighthawk. As I approached, Jack walked out onto the stern and leaned on the pushpit. He waved for me to come onboard, and I followed him into the galley—a dark, wooden room that rocked with the tide. Dugan sat at a small, square table that was slathered in fish scales. A single hooded lamp hung from above. Jack leaned against the galley counter and became a silhouette. Dugan kept his head back in the shadows. Under the light Dugan fashioned a pipe out of a soda can. He turned the can under the light and examined his work, crimping the aluminum a bit here and there, pinking holes with the tip of a filet knife. “You want a beer?” he asked without looking up, his image still flattened by shadows into the two-dimensional impression of a face.

“He doesn’t drink,” Jack answered for me. “He’s the good one.” Dugan grunted and set the can and the knife down. He pulled a sandwich bag from his pocket. I expected him to fill the makeshift bowl with weed. Instead, he picked out three or four small yellow chips, set them carefully over the pinholes. I asked Jack what it was.

“Cookie,” Dugan croaked.

He leaned back in his chair and set fire to the pipe. The smell struck my nostrils. Burning plastic. A hint of freshly vomited orange juice. Rotting vermin, maybe. The room swayed. The lamp drifted and splashed light across his face. Dugan’s eyes locked onto mine. He leaned into the light, pipe in hand, and rested his elbow on the table. Short hair, skeletal, balding, stubble. An impressively neat scar carved its way from the center of his hairline to his right temple, as if someone had once tried to remove his face with a scalpel. He asked me if I wanted some.

I shook my head no.

“Bulldog?”

Jack waved it off. Dugan withdrew uneasily, then took up the knife. “You say anything about this to anybody . . .” he flexed his wrist, slowly aiming the tip at my chest, “and I’ll cut your fucking heart out.” I focused on the tip of the blade, followed the shine down its edge, his arm, and then up to his eyes. I believed him. Jack’s face said be cool. Outside, a nasal exhaust rumble—like a Harley with a head cold—started to swell and Dugan’s face went slack. Had to be Barney. I figured he had just hit the crest of the bridge. 

The discordant roar settled outside, echoing across the water, the buildings on the far side of the inlet and back again. Jack rolled his eyes. Dugan stood up. “Does that little shit know you’re here?”    

“No,” I said. “But I’ll go out and talk to him.”

“Stay here,” Jack cut in. “He’ll go away.”

I hurried out of the galley.

Barney’s real name was Justin, but everybody at the marina called him Barney on account that he was a knucklehead and Barney was a knucklehead name. His limbs and face were long and goofy. We’d played on the same Little League team for one year when we were nine. Dad had coached us. Afterward I’d seen him maybe a dozen times, but he always acted as if we’d been lifelong best friends. I would move for a handshake and he would dive in for a hug. Then he would hold me at arm’s length and say: “So, how’s the old man?”

“Same as the last time you asked,” I’d say back to him.

Then he’d beam and stare inanely into the distance. “Man, that guy never changes.”

Barney was a dock rat. He hung out at the marina and worked for whichever captain was short-handed enough to take him. Most captains restricted him to throwing chum and cleaning vomit. Others wouldn’t let him onboard. He drove a mid-eighties Honda, and when all the other guys in town were installing cat-back exhaust systems on their cars, he responded by—as he called it—skipping the middleman and removing his muffler.

Outside, Paulie was gone and Barney idled obnoxiously beside Jack’s Mustang. When I got close he finally shut off the engine and leaned his head out of the window. “What the Hell are you doing on the beagle?”

“How can you drive with that noise?”

“Oh, it’s not that bad. For the first day or two you get a real bad headache, but then it all goes away. I hardly notice it now. What’s going on in there?”

“Nothing. You have anything?”

“Weed. Nah. I could call somebody.”

“Let’s do that.”

He stretched his neck out the window and looked in all directions. “They have a pay phone at the diner.” Barney got out of the car and we started across the parking lot to the diner on the opposite side of the highway. While we walked, two girls exited the diner and sat cross-legged in the grass. When we got closer I recognized one of the girls as Brittany, who I had known since kindergarten. We hadn’t spoken much in the past few years.

Barney approached the girls with me in tow. Brittany recognized me. We sat and got to talking. They had just come from one party and were thinking of going to another. Brittany’s pupils were the size of olives. She was exhausted but running. Her friend sat with her knees tucked to her chest and her arms folded over her stomach. The entire time this girl rocked back and forth, round-backed, studying the grass near her feet. Barney set his attention on Brittany. “So,” he said to her. “What are you guys gonna do?”

“Well, we had milkshakes, but now I’m getting kind of hungry.” She jutted her chin toward her friend. “Lisa should probably eat something solid.” Lisa squeezed her eyes shut and said she didn’t want to eat. They bickered and then Brittany invoked a tone that shattered Lisa’s will. They were going back in to eat. Barney turned to me with that look in his eye. He asked me if I was hungry and I shook my head no. I told him that Jack was expecting me back at the boat, that he would be furious if he came out and I wasn’t there. I stood up and gave a wave to the three of them. Barney stared at me a moment, then he reached up and shook my hand. '

From the far side of the parking lot, I heard commotion. I closed in and saw Jack hanging by his hands from the stern line, waist-deep in the water, halfway between the dock and the boat. Dugan stormed back and forth along the dock. In one hand he carried a gaff. Every time he passed he jabbed at Jack’s ribs with the bend of the hook. One side of Jack’s shirt was torn. Dugan shouted this would happen every night until he paid up, that he wasn’t somebody to fuck with, and I knew what I had to do.

Jack kept a club in his car—a two-foot bamboo pole, just in case. When I opened the door Dugan turned and saw me. The club lay alongside the driver’s seat, and I grabbed it as if I had a hundred times prior. “Oh,” he yelled, spreading his arms wide. “Now the little baby bulldog wants to play.” He threw down the gaff. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Barney.

Dugan grabbed a nearby hand truck, took two steps for momentum, and launched it at us. A superhuman throw, so much that it left us spellbound and all we could do was watch as it sailed, and it came down and crashed so close that we had to jump out of the way. Dugan held out his arms out to me, beckoning. “Come on, little boy. Time to grow up.”

I can still hear the sound of the asphalt beneath my feet that night, the small pebbles and sand crunching at the footfalls, my grip on the club tightening. This animal had hurt and humiliated my brother, and now I was going to cane him. I was going to ruin him. As I strode, I imagined how it would feel, his skull going soft under the impact. We came nose-to-nose, and Jack screamed for me to hit him. I grew lucid to my physical position, to my place in this world, to the sound of my breath. I was growling, actively working to summon the courage or maybe the insanity. Dugan’s eyes were black. He grinned wide and taunted me with whispers. “You tough, little boy, you tough, just like your bulldog brother?”

“Hit him,” Jack screamed.

“Huh, are you fucking tough?”

“Goddamnit, Chris!”

Dugan became quieter. “You want to go for a swim, too?”

“Hit him!”

I don’t know what I was waiting for, or why—call it youthful impotence or just a lack of guts, but I waited too long. Dugan snatched the club out of my hand. I caught my breath. Jack was mute. Dugan chucked the club into the water, and when the sound broke, I knew I was still just a kid. He grabbed my shoulders and shoved me toward the edge of the dock, but I didn’t give in. I resisted too much, or he simply shoved too easily, or rather he shoved just hard enough to let me know that he saw through me. He let go and started toward the pickup truck. On his way he called out to Jack. “You remember what I said, Bulldog. Every day.”

Jack struggled down the stern line toward the dock. He swung one foot up onto the edge of the pylon and righted himself. I went to him, and he didn’t even look at me. Just shoved me out of the way. I fell to one knee. Barney stood silent. Jack fired up the engine of the Mustang and roared out onto the highway. The smell of burnt tires and seawater swirled around us. Then we heard footfalls and turned to see Brittany running toward us. She emerged from the darkness, her chest heaving, the yellow haze of the dock light tinting the whites of her eyes.