The Flying Dutchman
By Paul Barrett
I’ve never been here this early before, with everything so quiet and calm and I really like it. Everything’s foggy and it’s perfectly still. No one has on their power sanders or their radios yet and you can hear the the crick-creak of the docks and the ropes stretching when the boats go from side to side and seagulls stare at their bird-reflections in the water. Most everyone’s still asleep, but some people are up bright and early, reading the newspaper and drinking their coffee in quick little sips like Mom does. But no one’s working yet. There’s dew on everything, and thin stripes where the dew dripped all the way down the hulls of the boats that aren’t in the water yet. I’m up because Daddy’s up, he’s running his yellow towel over everything, soaking up the dew and squeezing it onto the ground below and I think it’s a little bit gross when he does this because it sounds like someone’s down there peeing on the dirt.
Last night I could hear Mom’s blurry voice on the pay phone, all faraway and loud, and since Dad was talking extra calm, treating her like my little brother Andrew, I could tell she was still mad at him. He called her Doll, like he always does. He said “Relax for a second.” He said it a hundred times. He said “Yes, okay, I understand.” Then he covered the phone with his hand and told me to head back to the boat and start packing up my stuff, like it was time to go. I climbed up the ladder and stood on the deck, but instead of packing anything up I stayed outside and tried to find the Big Dipper, only it was too foggy to find anything, so instead I watched Dad talking to Mom. He had his arm up on top of the phone and was leaning on it, like if the phone wasn’t there he’d fall over. Like it was keeping him up. He didn’t move at all or swing his hands around like Mom always does when she’s mad about something. He just stood there. When he came back he asked if I wanted to spend the night at the boat or if I wanted to go home. He looked tired from talking to Mom, and I could tell he didn’t want to go home, and neither did I. I said I wanted to stay, definitely, and he smiled only a little smile. But I didn’t ask him about Mom, and he didn’t talk about her either, and soon he was back to normal, smiling and laughing like he always does. He taught me how to play Gin Rummy and it was a sleepover at the boatyard, just me and him.
I help my dad dry off the boat and he shows me how to squeeze the water onto the ground and then go back to drying. It scares me a little bit when the first power sander goes on, but pretty soon everyone has theirs on and I forget all about the squeaking ropes and the seagulls and it sounds just like it always does, just like I’m used to.
Once everything’s dried off I sit midship and watch my dad at the stern, sanding the front of a drawer he’s pulled out of the cabin. I have some magazines with me but I like to just sit and watch him working, and sometimes he looks over at me and smiles. Things are coated in dust. My bag with my magazines and my Captain’s Book of Nautical Charts that I got from Dad when I turned nine, that’s all coated in dust, and I try to wipe it off but I can’t. The dust is already soaked into the bag like a liquid dust, like when I try to wipe the blue off Daddy’s face and it feels wet and even after I wipe his cheek it’s still blue, and so are my fingers.
At lunchtime Dad brings out a tuna fish sandwich for each of us and I’m allowed to have half a Coke. He listens to the radio while we eat. He says once we’ve finished everything else and we’re ready to sail we’ll have a CD player installed as a finishing touch. He takes a bite of his sandwich and asks “Where should we sail first, Bug?”
This is an excerpt of “The Flying Dutchman”