and more locks, and the rapids are gone. The birds too, I expect. Heck, even the lighthouse is gone. Boats run all year long.
We thought we were special. We were, in our lighthouse. Even things like going to the bathroom. No toilet or outhouse, just went right over the side. There was something nice about that, part of the river. That river was clean and clear, exact same color as a Coca-Cola bottle.
Ma and Pa worked all day. He’d be checking the five lighthouses, sanding, painting, oiling gears. Ma would cook and clean away. Everybody worked, sanding, scraping barnacles, patching. Well, I didn’t work that much, never was much for work. I’d high-tail off in a skiff to the woods where I’d lie all day in the grass, under some spruce or hemlock tree. Flowers everywhere. No, sorry, I can’t remember any names of flowers. Can’t remember a damn thing anymore. Wild clematis, moon-weed, bittersweet! Ma had made me an oil-cloth sack to keep my books in. Never took it off. Even slept in it. Every Hardy Boys and western I could get my hands on. Sure! Sure you can bring me some Zane Greys! The most beautiful title ever written was Riders of the Purple Sage.
Early evening us kids would set out in the row-boat to fire up the lamps in the smaller lighthouses, on Sugar Island, Neebish, and two other points. Ed and George and Will and me, we’d fight over who got to do it, every damn time. Ed was the oldest. He had a mean streak. He’d pull the plug in the boat and just laugh, holding it out far over the water. Rest of us would have to bail like crazy not to swamp.
He still has a mean streak. Married to a mean old woman too. Captain of one of Ford’s river boats. George is Fire Chief of Sault Sainte Marie. Oh, you know. I mean they were. They’re all dead now. Been dead for years. I’m all that’s left. Ninety-five and can’t walk, can’t even hold up my head.
I wish I could say I’d been a better son. I was always a dreamer. A reader and a lover. In love every year, ever since kindergarten. Swear I was just as in love with Martha Sorensen when I was five years as I was when I got grown. And women, they all fell for me. I was a good-looker. No, don’t you be kidding me, I’m just an old shell now. Steve McQueen? Yeah, that’s my style … you got that right.
Lucille, my wife. We met in Detroit. It was love at first sight. Never was a love, a romance, like between us two. And it just kept on. She’s starting to hate me now, I can tell. No, she isn’t patient, either. I ask for orange juice and she hollers, “Wait a minute. Don’t get your shorts in a knot!” I wish I’d die today, just die, before she stops loving me.
I was twelve when my father was killed. 1916. We were in town. Bitter, cruel winter. He was working as a brakeman for the B & O line in the middle of a blizzard. Snow and wind howling so loud he didn’t see or hear the locomotive. Ran right over him. It was terrible, terrible. You must think me a baby, bawling like this. He was a big man. Fine man.
They took up a collection for us after the funeral. We were glad because there was nothing to eat. $50. You know they say, well, money went further in those days. $50. It was nothing, for eight of us. We all just wept.
Ed and George quit school and worked on the boats. Will became a Western Union boy. My sisters did housework. I wouldn’t quit school, but delivered papers mornings and nights. Dark and cold and snow bound. I hated it.
I admit it. I was bitter. Sorry for myself. Missed the lighthouse and just plain hated being so poor. Mostly it killed my pride to look shabby, to wear cheap shoes. Anyway when I was fifteen I ran away to Detroit. Got a dishwashing job and took up with an older woman. Gloria. A looker, with green eyes. Boy did I fall for her. She was a drinker, though. Whew, that’s another story.
Soon as I could I became a bartender, and that’s what I did all my life. Liked it, too. No, never was a drinking man. No excuse for being so ornery.
I only went back once. When my ma died. Thirty, forty years ago. Like to have broke my heart. They were all still mad at me, for running out on them and ma. And they were right. I had to swallow my pride and take their hatred. I deserved it. And I loved my ma. She and I were a lot alike. Daydreamers. I was ashamed I never once wrote her or went to see her before she died. Well, it was too late.
Got me a boat and went out to the lighthouse. Came pretty close to throwing myself off, I felt so rotten. Cried all day and night. Worst night of my life.
At night, from where we slept, as kids, we could watch the arc of the big light, intersecting with the signals from the other lighthouses. And in between there’d be stars, a million stars. All night long the boats would pass by. Whisper past like ghosts, rippling the water.
Unmanageable
In the deep dark night of the soul the liquor stores and bars are closed. She reached under the mattress; the pint bottle of vodka was empty. She got out of bed, stood up. She was shaking so badly that she sat down on the floor. She was hyperventilating. If she didn’t get a drink she would go into d.t.’s or have a seizure.
Trick is to slow down your breathing and your pulse. Stay as calm as you can until you can get a bottle. Sugar. Tea with sugar, that’s what they gave you in detox. But she was shaking too hard to stand. She lay on the floor breathing deep yoga breaths. Don’t think, God don’t think about the state you’re in or you will die, of shame, a stroke. Her breath slowed down. She started to read titles of books in the bookcase. Concentrate, read them out loud. Edward Abbey, Chinua Achebe, Sherwood Anderson, Jane Austen, Paul Auster, don’t skip, slow down. By the time she had read the whole wall of books she was better. She pulled herself up. Holding on to the wall, shaking so badly she could barely move each foot, she made it to the kitchen. No vanilla. Lemon extract. It seared her throat and she retched, held her mouth shut to reswallow it. She made some tea, thick with honey, sipped it slowly in the dark. At 6, in two hours, the Uptown liquor store in Oakland would sell her some vodka. In Berkeley you had to wait until 7. Oh, god, did she have any money? She crept back to her room to check in her purse on the desk. Her son Nick must have taken her wallet and car keys. She couldn’t look for them in her sons’ room without waking them.
There was a dollar and thirty cents in a change jar on her desk. She looked through several purses in the closet, in the coat pockets, a kitchen drawer, until she got together the four dollars that bloody wog charged for a half pint at that hour. All the sick drunks paid him. Although most of them bought sweet wine, it worked quicker.
It was far to walk. It would take her three quarters of an hour; she would have to run home to be there before the kids woke up. Could she make it? She could hardly walk from one room to the other. Just pray a patrol car didn’t pass. She wished she had a dog to walk. I know, she laughed, I’ll ask the neighbors if I can borrow their dog. Sure. None of the neighbors spoke to her anymore.
It kept her steady to concentrate on the cracks in the sidewalk to count them one two three. Pulling herself along on bushes, tree trunks, like climbing a mountain sideways. Crossing the streets was terrifying, they were so wide, with their lights blinking red red, yellow yellow. An occasional Examiner truck, an empty taxi. A police car going fast, without lights. They didn’t see her. Cold sweat ran down her back, her teeth chattered loudly in the still dark morning.
She was panting and faint by the time she got to the Uptown on Shattuck. It wasn’t open yet. Seven black men, all old except for one young boy, stood outside on the curb. The Indian man sat oblivious to them inside the window, sipping coffee. On the sidewalk two men were sharing a bottle of Nyquil cough syrup. Blue death, you could buy that all night long.
An old man they called Champ smiled at her. “Say, mama, you be sick? Your hair hurt?” She nodded. That’s how it felt, your hair, your eyeballs, your bones. “Here,” Champ said, “you better eat some of these.” He was eating saltines, passed her two. “Gotta make yourself
