All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 108

108

After the mess at the Merchants National Bank, Patch sold his car and spent a month hauling freight. At four in the morning he would pull on a hooded sweatshirt and load frozen meat into the backs of trucks that would cart it across the state.

As he walked, dawn stalked him like a reminder that sooner or later time would push him on. He took a room at the top of an old house, paid the cash up front because the old lady looked at him like she knew his kind.

The days grew longer and harder, and only when it was truly dark, when he blocked the bleed of streetlamps with duct tape and pressed newspaper over the glass five pages thick, when he’d cleared everything from the small bedroom, ripped the carpet from the floor and taken down the prints of the water lilies, did he pull the mattress to the floor, close his eyes and sleep.

He didn’t know which nights he would find her, but they were lessening now.

He noticed a couple of girls with the right kind of hair, almost the right way of speaking. Girls that emerged from the steps of fabled schools, drank in college bars, and soon grew weary of the same kind of college boy.

They’d glance his way and mistake the light in his eye for something that might reflect onto them. He’d probe at their past, find nothing but symmetry, and slip from their dorm rooms before first light.

After a long day he returned back to find his bag on the stoop. The old lady told him she did not care for the remodeling of his room.

For a month he stalled his hunt because he knew what little luck remained could not be ridden so hard, so at a Gloucester marina he stopped

at each trawler and asked if they needed someone to do the kind of jobs rising lobster prices meant they could farm out.

He cleaned algae from the metal lines, blood and guts and sinew. He set traps, hacked bait, and measured lobster from eye to rear. He sifted through, pulled out new shells, notched breeders, and banded the unlucky.

“Steady, kid,” Skip said, as they rode billows. He stood beside the center console and held the wheel and watched Skip’s men haul yellow traps from the seabed as evening mist surfed swells. Behind, the New England coastline hid towns and mountains after white sand beaches.

A couple of men gave him shit about the eye patch, like he was playing at being a pirate. The first time he’d sat on the gunwale, his throat dried from the salt air and his face ached from the smile. And after, when they reached the marina, he’d unload and begin his cleaning while Skip reached for a cooler and handed out beers.

Patch stayed on the boat and drank alone, watching the setting sun.

At night he slept on a piece of beach bracketed by low bluffs, his shirt rolled up to make a pillow on the fine sand. Tired out from the day, he did not eat near enough, kept what little Skip gave him because he knew soon enough he would move on, toward her.

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