Envious Moon(3)

When I wasn’t on the North Atlantic, we’d hang out at Victor’s apartment or out on the jetty where we could watch the boat traffic coming through the breakwater. If we were lucky one of the older fishermen would buy us some beer to drink. Sometimes we’d go to the mall in Westerly and get something to eat and just walk around. Once in a while, on warm days in the fall and the spring, we’d drive to Providence and sit on the benches on Thayer Street and watch the college girls walk by in their new clothes. They never so much as gave us the time of day, two olive-skinned boys in hooded sweatshirts. We loved to look at them; how pretty they were with their long hair, but it bothered me they didn’t acknowledge our stares. I tried to explain this to Victor but he didn’t get it.

“Tony,” he said. “What do you care? They’re rich girls.”

And I knew he was right, they were rich white girls, and we were a couple of Portuguese, but I couldn’t get it out of my head.

I also did something when we sat on the bench that I never told anyone about, not even Victor. Sometimes I’d see a particular girl, and it didn’t have anything to do with what she looked like. They might be blond or brunette, occasionally really pretty, other times more plain. It was more a way they carried themselves that caused me to pick them out. The way they walked, the way they stood, how they looked all around, all of it suggesting to me a sadness hidden from the rest of the world. I was always attracted to sad girls, even before I met her. And when I picked out this particular girl, in my mind I imagined our whole lives together. And while I pictured different things, one image returned over and over again. It was a bright summer day and this girl was in the small yard in front of our house in Galilee. She wore an old sundress and sandals and she had planted flowers and was on her knees tending to them. Her hair was tied up behind her head but one lone strand swung across her forehead. Her hands were covered with dirt and while she worked she sometimes touched her face and there were smudges of dirt from this on her cheeks. She was completely engaged in what she was doing and had no idea she was being watched. I stood in the road and studied her. Over my shoulder was my oilskin bag and I was weary from three weeks at sea. She wasn’t expecting me because there was no way to know precisely when I would be back. I would watch her as long as I could, until that moment when she became aware of my gaze, that moment when she looked up and saw me standing there. Then the smile started in her eyes, and quickly moved down her face to her mouth. It took over all of her. She would rise to her feet and wipe her hands on her old sundress, not caring about the streaks she had left on it. She’d run across the small sandy yard then, through the metal gate and out to the road. I’d wait until she reached me before I let my bag slide off my shoulder and hit the ground. I’d smell like the floor of the fish cannery but she wouldn’t care less. She’d leap into my arms and I’d spin her, her legs off the ground, while her kisses rained onto my neck.





Everyone knew that house. Where it sat, on the easternmost tip of Cross Island, you couldn’t miss it. Our path to the Grand Banks took us right underneath its turret and all the men used it as a landmark. It meant we were only an hour from home.

I don’t believe it ever occurred to me that someone actually lived there. It didn’t look like the kind of place where people lived. I had no frame of reference for people living in houses that size. It looked like part of the landscape itself, sitting as it did above the granite cliffs, near where the corner of the island hit the broad Atlantic, leaning out over the water like it was one good storm away from tumbling in.

Then one night on the jetty, Victor brought the house into my life.

This was the summer I turned seventeen and Victor and I spent practically every ounce of free time we had out on the jetty. It was our place. We’d drink beer out of cans and sit under the stars listening to the water and watching the boats slide past us in the dark. We’d smoke cigarettes and talk about girls. Neither of us had any prospects, to tell you the truth. All of the girls we knew were still in high school, which we weren’t. Our work took us strictly into the world of men. And we could not go into bars yet. Bars seemed like some kind of nirvana. Even walking past the few dives in town, the door would sometimes be propped open against the summer heat and inside we’d see men we knew leaning against the bar with beers in their hands, arms draped around women who would never have given us the time of day. It appeared to us that you just needed to be old enough, and once you were, you could drink the night away and then know what it was to be between the legs of a beautiful woman.

The night Victor told me about the house was a perfect summer night, clear as can be, and without moon. Above us was the great diffused spray of the Milky Way. Below us the waves lapped against the barnacled rocks of the jetty. The only sound was from the thrum of the diesel engines from passing lobster boats. We had a six-pack of beer. Victor started by saying he had done a wake at the house two nights before. An old woman had lived there alone, he said, had died in the kitchen, and then there was a wake in the house a week later. There was no funeral home on the island so they hired O’Brien’s. I thought this was shaping up to be another one of Victor’s funny stories about working at the funeral home. Like the one he told about a removal they did from a colonial on the waterfront near Connecticut. Some old fellow had died on the third floor and in this old house the staircases were so narrow there was no way they were going to get the gurney up to get him. So O’Brien had Victor keep the family busy in the kitchen and their eyes away from the window. From upstairs O’Brien just tossed the old man out the window and in the kitchen Victor saw the old man go by and he said he expected to hear a thud when he hit but that he was as quiet as falling leaves. The family never knew. O’Brien and Victor scooped the body off the lawn and into the hearse.