He looked like shit and I’d never been happier to see anyone in my life. I went to hug him but he pushed past, dropping his jacket on the floor. Underneath he wore a blue filling station coverall, which was dirty and ripped at both knees, and his work boots were spattered with paint and varnish stains. His eyes were half shut and he’d shaved his head.
“Jesus,” I said.
Grey jumped on Ship’s bed and put his feet up. “This one yours?”
“No.”
“Does it belong to Dennis?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He sat up and looked for a place to flick his ash, which fell as he did. He ground the ashes into the bedspread, then found an empty Coke can on Ship’s desk to use as an ashtray.
“How’d you get down here?”
“Hitched to Minneapolis and took a bus from there.”
“Where’s Callie?”
“Home.”
“How come she didn’t come with?”
“I didn’t feel she should travel in her condition.”
“Which condition?”
“Pregnant,” he said. He said it in an offhand way, as though it was news I’d heard but forgotten.
“What?”
“She’s pregnant,” he said. “She’s going to have a baby.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, six months.”
“Do your mom and dad know?”
“Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“Jack said I should tell you.”
“Does Dolores know?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“Get out.”
“You’re shitting me.”
He shook his head.
“Where’s she staying?”
“Our house.”
“She mad you left?”
He took a long, two-part drag on the butt. “She didn’t know I was coming.”
I tried to picture Callie pregnant and couldn’t, any more than I could picture Drucilla Gordon pregnant. “I’ll go back with you,” I said.
“I’m not asking.”
“What’d you come for, then?” I asked, and he was about to answer when Ship popped through the door and looked sadly at Grey.
It was only after we convinced Dennis that Grey would be gone the next day—which we all knew was a lie—that he returned to his standard pallor. Grey slept in my bed that night. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since we bunked together. We didn’t say two words before he was asleep. The next morning Grey went to Dooley’s class with me. It was hard to get used to him without the hair. It’d always been the first thing anyone noticed. I gave him a notebook to carry. If the campus impressed him, he didn’t show it. Chewing on a wad of gum, he mostly looked straight ahead, except to turn his head occasionally to watch someone go by, never to look at the various landmarks I pointed out. I’d say something like, “There’s the observatory,” and he’d nod as though he already knew and say, “Yeah, great.”
It was Dooley’s last lecture of the semester, on Polk and the Mexican War. While he paced the western expanses of the map, tracing his pointer along the Rio Grande, Grey hummed to himself and doodled Fender guitars in his notebook. Dooley, who believed that history was made not in war but in treaty, skipped over the battles and talked instead of the Wilmot Proviso. We hadn’t made it to the Civil War, which was kind of a bummer because I can only imagine what he would have to say about the dark enterprises behind that disaster. Nonetheless the students stood and cheered when he finished. He bowed and left the stage and the applause got louder, while Grey looked up from his drawing. “Do they do this every day?”
At lunch at the Plaza, a quarter-beer joint, Grey bought two bottles of Point and we played some pool. He knocked down two solids on the break and lined up a combination across the full length of the table,
“What are you going to do?” I asked him, hoping to mess up his shot.
He pocketed the ball and said, “About what?”
Grey was good at pool. I wasn’t particularly. Grey was good at almost everything that I wasn’t. I believed that there had to be something that I could beat him at, but I hadn’t found it. “Get married, I guess.” He put away the eight ball and held out his hand for more quarters.
I said, “You think you have to?”
“Break,” he said.
The cue ball smacked the formation and sent the twelve ball flying off the table. He missed an easy side shot by striking too hard, and I ran three solids that were bunched in a corner before missing on a bank.
“So what’s the problem?”
He didn’t have a shot and circled the table twice before tapping the cue ball against the rail so I wouldn’t either. “I need money?”
“How much?”
“How much you got?” he said.
I thought he was joking. “What does it cost to have a baby?” I asked and scratched. The question caught the attention of two girls sitting in the next booth and they stared.
Grey looked annoyed, missed his next shot, and watched me miss one as well before he said, “Not what I’m worried about.” He tried to pocket the thirteen but succeeded only in kicking it out of the corner. I dropped the two and followed up with the eight on an easy shot and felt satisfied to have won, but Grey wasn’t paying attention. He laid the cue on the table and dangled his beer between two fingers as we walked to our table. We sat. He leaned in close. “I’m working a deal,” he said. “I talked to this guy at the marina.”
“Local?”
“You don’t know him.”
“They own a cabin?”
“I said you don’t know him. He’s got a ketch—”
“He’s got a catch?”
“A ketch, a twenty-two-foot ketch. Thirty years old, sixteen of those in dry dock, prime condition, he says.”
“What does he want from you?”
“It’s up in Canada. He wants five thousand dollars. It’s worth ten times that. He says he’ll give it to me for two grand if I sail it out.”
“From where?”
“Up there.”
“I don’t know. The other side of the lake.”
“What’s over there?”
“I’m not sure we need to know,” he said.
“He’s got this boat worth fifty thousand dollars and he’s going to give it to you for two.”
Grey wiped the foam off his lips with his sleeve. “That’s about it.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. Taxes or something. You want another?” he asked, then lifted my bottle and saw that it was full. “It doesn’t sound right,” I said.
He shrugged. If he was hiding something from me it wouldn’t be the first time. He wasn’t above a lie.
“How much can you kick in?”
Grey shook his head.
“I have it,” I said. “It’s about all I have.”
He looked up from his beer. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’ll get it all back.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it’s an investment. Look,” he said. He set his beer bottle down on the far corner of the table, then with his left hand pushed the tin ashtray toward it. “They pay me to fly up to Sault Ste. Marie. I take a bus to Michipicoten, which is where the boat is. Hand over the dough, sign a piece of paper, and it’s all mine—ours. Then it’s a beam reach south by southwest home.” The bottle left a wet trail on the Formica as he slid it back toward him and lifted it to his mouth. “It’s a simple transaction. I bring the boat back. Fix it up. It shouldn’t need much, from what he says, and whatever materials it does need I can cover on credit. I sit back and take bids.
“When it’s all over you get the front money back and, say, twenty percent.”
The more he talked the worse the deal sounded. “When would you go?”
“Soon as the thaw. End of March, I’m hoping. Might have to wait until April.”
“I’ll go with,” I said.
“I’m not asking.”
“I know,” I said, “but I’ll go.”
“You don’t get it,” he said, “I’m not asking you.”
When we got back to the room, Ship was on the phone, saying, “Yes, Mom, no, Mom, I don’t, Mom. Mom—I don’t.” Grey flopped down next to him on his bed and Ship moved to the desk.
“When can you get it?” Grey asked.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“Cash.”
“I’ll get cash.”
Ship hung up the phone. “What cash?”
Grey looked at me as if asking whether he should tell Ship the story. I shook my head. “Tom’s been cheating on his tests,” he said. “I told him I wouldn’t say anything about it if he paid me off.”
Ship looked like he was trying to decide if Grey was telling the truth. “Well,” he said, pleased with the thought that just crossed his mind, “then I guess you won’t be getting any money, then, because you told me.”
“You know,” Grey said, “you’re right. I shouldn’t get any money now that I told somebody.”
On Saturday morning, we went down to the bank. You wouldn’t have thought it was much of a thing for a student to withdraw his savings at the end of term, but the way Grey stood next to me—shoulder to the counter, casing the lobby—made the teller nervous, which got me feeling like I had something to hide. She held my driver’s license for a long time, looking at the picture, at me, and at the picture again before she handed over the money, twenty-one hundred-dollar bills and change. I shoved the money into the inside pocket of my coat and held my arm tight against it so that I looked like I was packing heat or something. The white-haired bank cop watched us as we walked out.
It was one of those clear winter days that come with cold temperatures. Shivering, Grey held out his hand.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
He said, “Give it to me.”
“That’s okay.”
The sun was in his eyes and he squinted the same way he did when he was looking to start a fight. “I said give it.”
“I know and I said that’s okay.” People passing on the sidewalk were staring. I walked. Grey caught up and grabbed me by the arm. It’s mine, I wanted to say, but he wouldn’t have liked the sound of that. “What difference does it make who holds it?” is what I did say.
As he stared at the ground, I could see on his skull the inch-long white line where the hair didn’t grow back, a scar from where I split his head open with a can of Lincoln Logs when we were eight. “Look,” he said. “I don’t think you’re getting it. The people I’m talking about. They don’t know you. They never asked me to bring anybody else in. Get it. I’m not asking you to come with. I don’t want you to. Come on,” he jabbed his knuckles into my belly and made a flicking motion with his fingers. “Hand it over.”
I already knew I was going to give him the money, but I said, “What’s the hurry if you can’t go until April?”
He dropped his hand. “I left out a step.”
“I figured that out.”
He laughed sarcastically. “Yeah, well I hope so.”
He smiled in a way I’d seen dozens of times but never aimed at me. There was hate in it. It said, You can’t get where I am from where you are. “Fuck you,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Fuck me,” and slapped the envelope into his hand.
Grey ended up staying through exam week, which I didn’t mind because Ship did. To get even for him conning me out of every cent I had (I already knew I would never see that money again), I told him I had to study. Every morning I sat at my desk, staring at an open book, until he threw on his coat and left the room. Most of the time I was too distracted to wonder where he went. My exam results weren’t good, but nothing that happened could be blamed on Grey. I studied hard but exams were a lot like a field sprint in a bike race: you could go from first to last in a hurry. I blew my Trig final, a rookie error. The test was cumulative, which Professor Jeer might have told us and I forgot, or he told us and I didn’t think to worry about it, reasoning that if I could do the problems from the end of the semester I could do the ones from the beginning. That turned out not to be true. By the time I finished the exam the room was empty, outside of me and the proctor, and I wasn’t optimistic about how I had done.
On Tuesday, I had my German final, which consisted of a short-answer test and an oral presentation titled “Auf den Strand.” That should have been easy, except that Fräulein Menendez didn’t care so much about how well you could talk in German as she did about if you used all the vocabulary words assigned. Since I hadn’t bothered to remember which ones they were, it was pretty much dumb chance which ones showed up in my talk. I got nervous and substituted some of Pop’s Frisian words—wetter for wasser and seil for segel, thinking, as I did, that it was a crazy world where someone like me who could speak the language like he had been born in Germany, wouldn’t score as well as the captain of the girls swim team. This bothered me so much that I spent the rest of the afternoon feeling sorry for myself and forgot to hand in my final essay for English composition.
I still had my term paper for Dooley to write. I called my essay “The Betrayal of Tecumseh” because the word betrayal had been bouncing around in my head and I liked the sound of it. The problem is that I came up with the title before I did any of the research. Then I read three books on Tecumseh and couldn’t find where he was betrayed by anybody. You could say that the tribes of the south and west betrayed him by not joining his confederacy, but they had never said they would in the first place. You could say that he was betrayed by William Henry Harrison, but to me betrayed means that someone you trust turns on you, and I doubt that Tecumseh ever trusted the general. You could say the betrayal was of the Indians by the white men, but, I thought, who doesn’t know that? The betrayal of Tecumseh, then, had to be the fact that weak men can overcome stronger men if their only desire is to destroy those who are better than them. This came to me in my last paragraph. I didn’t start over.
I typed the last of the bibliography at six in the morning while Ship wheezed underneath his blankets. I hadn’t seen Grey since the previous afternoon. Blowing the last of the Wite-Out dry on the page, I threw my coat on over my pajamas, and headed down to Dooley’s office to slide the paper under the door. On the way over to the Humanities building, the wind ripped through the fabric of my clothes and I shivered, but on the way back the sun was rising, casting a glare on the dome of the observatory.
A thought popped into my head, so odd that I said it out loud. “I go to college.”
The words meant something to me. For four months I’d been lonely, scared at times, and angry, but I’d also been happy. I couldn’t build a boat, but I’d learned a thing or two.