May Vignette #3 [Archive]

Etheryn

05-21-12, 01:34 AM

Serenades, candlelit dinners, love letters, roses; Dan was a dancer with two left feet if the tune was women. He just didn’t have the luxury of time to solve them. It would be downright impossible to commit to sleeping in the same bed each night, let alone next to the same female, when he was generally occupied by hopping contents and eluding the fulfilment of his bounty. Beside that, if it didn’t explode, wasn’t edible, drinkable, or couldn’t be caught on a ganghook, his interest waned quick.

“With wants. And needs. And what if she wants kids?” Dan said. He could’ve sworn that Aaron just suggested he cut off his big toe.

“Absolutely. One day you should stop being such a grub and find yourself a lady,” Aaron said knowingly.

“You’re just saying this because you think it’s funny how I go red in the face,” Dan accused. “I can’t help it man. You shouldn’t take advantage."

“I’m not ‘just saying.’ I swear it,” Aaron scoffed, and covered his mouth with his hand in futility. In seconds he busted a gut laughing. There was some inherently awkward about the bruiser shape of his brother all dreamy eyed in domestic bliss. It was like imagining a bulldog snuggling a kitten.

Dan shook his head and ducked out to the deck, and Aaron waited in the cutter’s cabin doorway to keep out of the chilly breeze. The morning rose on the final stretch of their intercontinental voyage north west from Corone on a stolen—or “forcibly purchased”—vessel. They peeled a neat line of spray and wake from the surface of along the uncharacteristically tame northern oceans. They’d only precious little time for idle banter like this before they hit Salvar’s shore, and all the unknowns and hidden dangers and tribulations that leg of the journey would bring. The looming, jagged shape of their new frozen home was growing on the distant horizon.

“I have been on a date before, Aaron,” said Dan with a scarcely believable “I’m-not-lying” kind of tone.

He’d been handed the spoon and there wasn’t a chance Aaron would miss the opportunity to stir the pot. “You haven’t.”

Dan looked shocked as he spun the skipper’s wheel, then ran to unhook a carabineer from a rope on the mainsail. “Have so!”

“Oh yeah?” Aaron prodded. “What was her name?”

“Well, it’s a long story…” Dan started.

***

Dan’s belly was so full of butterflies he actually threw up. Not just thought about it, and not just belched a little, but full-on buckled over and tossed his lunch into the bay. He knew if Old Ross caught him being such a skirt after a short day’s fishing the open sea that it’d be a hiding and thousand yard stare of disapproval. Dan’s boss thought even little boys were supposed to be tough. Dan wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt and made out like nothing happened.

“What’re you all leaned over for, son?” Old Ross asked in his gravelly, salt-parched rumble of a voice. He was busy unloading coiled rope and empty crab pots to the wharf that he and Dan were standing on. “You drop something?”

“I, uh…yeah,” Dan said. He didn’t plan to lie, yet Old Ross held out the fibber’s branch and he took it unthinkingly.

Old Ross peered over and looked in the water. It was getting dark by the dwindling sun, and the balmy amber glow that settled over its tack flat surface was divided by shadows of window mullions in distorted grids, cawing gulls and moor posts. They stood on the middle of Orient Wharf, a gathering hub for a coterie of dory boats and trawlers that moored at Baitman’s Bay—Dan’s hometown.

Orient Wharf was known for being one of the highest launch platforms in town, and so Old Ross almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to see whatever it was that Dan said he’d “dropped.” It would be too far down. The sailor, knowing by years of overseeing less savoury deckhands who’d do more than lie, pretended to look. He adjusted the baggy green of his cap with one hand, stroked a wiry beard with the other.

“So, what was it?” Old Ross continued. He stuffed his hands in his pockets.

Dan paused. Hands in pockets meant trouble. He scratched his head and started playing with a lock of hair and squinted toward the horizon, raising his hand as a visor. The answer wasn’t there. Instead, he glanced back to the violet tinged overcast that crowned the bracing mountains of his only home. Nothing there either.

***

“Wait, wait, wait. When was it you started losing your hair?” Aaron teased, exaggerating the motion of finger combing his ample locks of youthful blonde and streaks of “life-experience-grey,” as he coined it.

Dan took it like water off a duck’s back. “Eighteen, you jerk. I haven’t been bald forever.”

“Okay, okay,” Aaron nodded. He helped Dan with adjusting rigging and scrubbing away a week’s worth of bird droppings that was caking to and fouling the cutter’s decking.

“Can I continue with my story?” Dan said, and threw the wet brush at Aaron. It connected square in the side of the head.

“That’s gonna leave a lump,” he said as he rubbed a red mark on the side of his face. The wet brush was heavy hardwood with horse mane bristles. Dan may as well have pegged a brick.

“Good. As I was saying…”

***

“You about to tell me a porky-pie?” Old Ross warned. He kneeled in front of Dan, who being only eleven years old, wasn’t quite tall enough to stand eye-to-eye with his boss.

Dan looked at his feet. “No sir.”

A leathered index and thumb crept from their pocket and raised up, threatening like a viper, to cup under Dan’s chin and pinch his cheeks. Old Ross forced their eyes to meet. “Look at me when you say that if you mean it.”

Dan remained silent. Old Ross let go, and stood up. He turned around and boarded their bobbing white trawler again. Dan couldn’t bear a cold shoulder. It took less than five seconds for the boy to follow, hop awkwardly over the gunnel, and clear his throat of an pretend cough.

“Sorry, sir,” said Dan.

“What for?” Old Ross asked with feigned ignorance.

“I was gonna lie to you,” Dan confessed. He kept his chin up when he said it.

Old Ross nodded. “’Least you didn’t lie to me now.”

Dan looked at his feet again, then back up, then to the captain’s wheel and to the vast expanse of ocean. He didn’t want that untold story of adventure to end before it started. Old Ross laid the consequences bare when he took Dan on, and lying was nothing but ballast to be dumped.

“Spit it out,” Old Ross prodded.

“I was nervous,” Dan said.

“About? You did well today,” Old Ross praised and clapped Dan on the shoulder. He almost crumbled under the impact.

Dan was quiet.

“Well?”

“I-was-gonna-ask-Mrs-Whitterby’s-daughter-if-she-wanted-to-play-with-me-tomorrow-but-I’m- scared-that-she’ll-say-no!” Dan blurted out so fast it was one word. His little shoulders slumped and he kicked at one shoe with the toe of the other.

Old Ross, one of the most straight-faced and icy cold fishermen in town—rumoured once to have bitten a rock thinking it was chocolate and then spit out sand—just melted. No tough guy can say his heart isn’t butter when kids do those adorable little things.

He laughed warmly. “Listen up, Dan-o,” Old Ross said. “Let’s figure out what you should do.”

Dan’s watery, innocent eyes, big as dinner plates, snapped up to meet Old Ross’, and he hung on every word. He wasn’t in trouble. In fact, Old Ross was going to help!

“You just walk up to Mrs Whitterby’s door and knock on it all manly like. When Mrs Whitterby answers, what do you say?”

“Hello ma’am!” Dan said with cheer.

“And what else?” prompted Old Ross.

“Um…oh. Hello, ma’am! How do you do?” Dan said. His little fists balled up with excitement and his arms pinned straight by his sides. He stood up tall and proud that he’d remembered good manners.

“Spot on. Do you know Mrs Whitterby’s daughter’s name?”

Dan was momentarily distracted by a seagull that came to sit on the gunnel and listen in on their private conversation. He chased it off with a waggle of his finger and a warning. "You better not be a sticky-beak, birdie. This is people talk."

Old Ross bubbled up with mirthful laughter again. Sometimes he’d wished for kids of his own, but the only one who’d consider him…well, she was sick and spoken for. She refused all help. Her only desire, small is at were, was to help her son take to the water. “Dan. Do you know Mrs Whitterby’s daughter’s name?”

Dan thought as hard as he could. If he’d already been told he couldn’t remember. “No sir.”

Old Ross nodded his head, exaggerated his pondering hum, and kneeled down to Dan’s eye level once more. “You should ask Mrs Whitterby to tell you. And if her daughter’s name is, let’s say…Jenny. What would you say next?”

“But that’s the scary part! I would say ‘Does Jenny want to come play with me?’ and then she might say ‘no!’”

Old Ross shook his head. “Tell you what.”

“Tell-me-tell-me-tell-me-sir!” Dan said. He was bouncing on his heels and toes now.

“If Mrs Whitterby’s daughter says ‘no,’ then you get to be captain. You get the whole boat. I’ll give you my hat and all,” Old Ross said with a roguish wink. He settled the bag of his cap over his youngest deckhand’s head. “I promise.”

Dan’s jaw almost fell off and hit the deck. He gawked, his neck craned at angle to see beneath the brim. “Really?”

Old Ross nodded and looked to Mrs Whitterby’s house; a square cube of granite and mortar set into the hillside at least a kilometre from Orient Wharf. The line of sight was clear but the home was only a speck in the distance. He pointed at it and Dan kept gawking, as if he’d just been told Old Ross was actually from another planet.

“You’ll really let me be captain?” Dan said again, unaware that Old Ross was showing him where to go.

“I promise,” he said again.

For a moment Dan thought about not visiting Mrs Whitterby and her daughter just so he could say he’d been rejected and take over as captain, effective tomorrow. He’d sail the high seas and catch the biggest fish anyone ever caught.

“Don’t even think about it,” Old Ross warned. He pointed to Mrs Whitterby’s house once more. “Off you go. Before it gets too dark.”

Dan was perplexed at how Old Ross could see his thoughts like freshly laid ink. He didn’t ponder it too long before he bound off the boat like a jackrabbit, onto Orient Wharf, and hurtled full speed to Mrs Whitterby’s house without ever slowing down. He bumped more than a few tradesmen on the way, and lengths of timber for shaping hulls and tangled nets were dropped to the mud and soil in Dan’s wake.

***

“You are so impossibly full of crap I can’t even believe it,” Aaron said behind the curling smoke of his cigarette. He leaned back on the stool as if to get a better look at Dan’s embellishment.

“I’m not,” Dan said with a smug grin. He leaned closer over the skipper’s table for emphasis. “It’s the truth. I was that cute.”

Aaron shook his head and tapped the cigarette. “Old Ross never smiled and he hated kids,” he said knowingly. “I think what really happened Old Ross caught you out telling a ‘porky-pie,’ smacked you silly, and sent you home crying to Mum.”

Dan’s grin became a smirk.

***

Dan’s impatient fist knocked on the door to Mrs Whitterby’s house. The door didn’t quite fit in the frame and the handle was broken off. One window was boarded up with plywood, and the other stained and dirty. It was like a cabin in lost woods that should’ve been resided by a dishevelled hermit. It was fitting, it seemed, because Dan’s feet were black with dirt as well and he still smelled like rock cod from the day’s toil on the boat.

“Hello?” Dan called to the door. “Mrs Whitterby? Ma’am?”

No answer.

Dan walked to the window and rubbed at the layer of grime that obscured his view inside. He pressed his face against the pane and tried to steal a peek, but couldn’t make out anything but the shapes of furniture and an unlit fireplace. It was dark.

“Anyone home?” Dan persisted, knocking harder.

He should’ve been disappointed, but the promise of Old Ross—who’d never break one—made a balance. The way this was going he’d be captain by breakfast. Secretly, his heart soared. All of the ocean to explore! The world was his! Daydreams started playing out in the pictures of a bedtime story before he could make ten steps from Mrs Whitterby’s stoop.

By fifteen steps, Dan heard the door creak open. He spun around on the spot, and before he made the full revolution said “Hello Mrs Whitter—

“Who is it?”

She was a little taller and a little older than Dan, with waist-length, straight blonde hair all snowy white. Her dress was full length and long sleeved with lacy, frilled cuffs, yet she wore no shoes and the bottom hem was all dirty and frayed. She was distant, and Dan felt she was looking right through him. It made him unsettled. He’d barely come close enough to be sure, but her eyes were a colour he’d never seen; milky grey and pale blue at the same time.

“I, uh… My name’s Dan,” he said. Dan was going red in the face. He tried to push his hair around to hide the rosiness of his cheek.

“Hello Dan,” she said. “I’m Isabelle. Did you come to see my Ma?”

Dan looked at his feet. “No. I mean, uh, aw…yes?” He knew he was supposed to talk to Mrs Whitterby first.

“She’s asleep,” Isabelle said. “You’ll have to come by another day.”

Dan’s heart beat a jittery tattoo in his chest. This wasn’t going the way it was supposed to. “Can I ask you something?”

Isabelle barely moved. She was like a doll that’d escaped the factory and learned to speak. “Sure you can, Dan.” She giggled at the rhyme. Dan copied, somewhat at ease now.

“Do ya wanna come play with me some time?” Dan started. “It’s okay if you don’t want to, because Old Ross said that if you say no he’ll make me captain and I get to take the boat and sail all around the—

“Of course I do.”

Dan went quiet. “Really?”

Isabelle nodded and smiled. Her teeth were as white as her hair, and one was missing from the front. She’d grown up quicker than him. “You have to come tomorrow though. And Ma won’t like it if you come by smelling like fish.”

***

“HA!” Aaron whooped and slapped the sidewall of the cabin so hard he swung in the hammock like a pendulum. “Nothing’s changed!”

Dan raised his eyebrow at the ceiling. He lay in the other hammock, telling his story as he contemplated the stains and splinters in the structure of their boat. “What?”

“You were the dirtiest kid I ever knew. It was like taking a bath caused you physical pain. Here I was, thinking Mum would’ve drummed some hygiene into you when I left for Radasanth,” Aaron said.

“You were the one who made me scrub and brush my hair and wear shoes and all that,” Dan reminded. “I was ten when you left. You’d been gone for a year when I met Isabelle.”

Aaron nodded, quickly humbled by the reminder of how early he’d left his family to chase glory in the military. How early he’d left his little brother, junior by so many years, to spend childhood without a big brother to look out for him. Aaron was seventeen when he bailed out on Dan.

He was quiet with guilt while Dan finished the story. Neither knew how the other really felt.

***

Dan and Isabelle sat together at the top of a hill near the outskirt of town. The sun was high overhead and the day was hot. Silhouettes of seagulls and a lonely eagle streaked across the ground, and Dan tried to look up. The sun hurt his eyes and he squinted away the spots. It didn’t seem to bother Isabelle.

“How old are you, Isabelle?” Dan asked.

Isabelle looked down to the bay. Dan copied, and watched the trawlers and dinghies and dories slowly bob out on the calling sea. Something about them summoned him and his mind wandered a thousand miles away, too vague to hear Isabelle’s answer.

“… What about you?” she asked.

Dan pretended he listened. “Eleven.”

Isabelle was fidgeting with a stick. She poked it around to her side, and Dan copied again, picking up his own stick and snapping twigs from it. He made a scattered pile while he watched Isabelle walk to the shade. “It’s hot,” she said.

“It is,” Dan said.

He followed her and sat next to her. All of a sudden, he was filled with excitement for a brilliant an idea. He struck a dramatic pose, stick held high like a warrior’s blade. “Let’s have a sword fight! I can be the bad guy, and you can be a warrior princess, and…”

Dan trailed off when he looked to Isabelle. She was worried and wringing at the hem of her dress. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.

“But why not?” Dan put his stick down, deflated. She seemed to look straight through him again like she saw another world that Dan wasn’t part of.

Isabelle was quiet. Dan sat next to her again, and tamed the boyish urge to start the sword fight anyway and force her to defend herself. The tree they were under was one of the biggest and oldest—a stalwart and immovable beech—and Dan saw the sticks they’d held came from the tree itself.

“Is it because you like the tree? And you don’t wanna hurt his branches? That’s okay,” Dan said, moving the stick aside like it was actually a delicate animal that one should take care of. “I won’t hurt it.” He even went so far with the make-believe as to pet it.

Isabelle laughed weakly and forced. “That’s not it.”

Dan was stumped, but in a few moments he’d figured it out. He was starting to understand these “girl” creatures. “Is it because you don’t want to get a scratch on your face?” he tried. “Because that’s okay too. You’re really pretty. If you had a scratch on your face that wouldn’t be very nice.”

It was Isabelle’s turn to go red in the face. Dan beamed. “Is that it? ‘Just cause you’re really pretty?”

All of a sudden, she stood up and took the stick with her, held it out front, and started walking down the hill ever so carefully. “I need this stick for something else, Dan. I’m blind.”

With a maturity and understanding far beyond his years, Dan nodded his head. He offered no condescending pity or undue attention. Old Ross would’ve been proud when at the quip. “So that’s why you said yes.”

They chose a different game and played until a mother's voice sang their names in distant echoes up the hill. They would be friends from then on and all their days to come, no matter how their paths diverged.