56. Sometime after that, in New York, at the round oak table in the kitchen, while the phone sat on the windowsill, Marilyn wrote:

Across the mud flats and wide roads, over rivers and borders,

by bus, truck, trailer, car and foot,

my two loves have gone, the dark and the fair.

Truck drivers, salesmen, schoolgirls on vacation

taste the salt fruit of their bodies.

They breathe strange air; strange hands press their shoulders.

Strange voices speak to them …

Along the highway despair and dead animals

steam on the macadam … Miles apart, in a mud-wide state

from red hill to scrub brush …

They sing out loud and the long road is empty.

Together, briefly, they sit on splintered pilings.

Thick, spit-yellow foam slaps at the Diesel hulls.

Storms are in the Gulf; the catch is north.

North on an old coast, landlocked on my island

dry in soot-thick summer, I spin their warmth.

I loop their names in words. One road is closed

to women and conspirators. I plot. I sing.

Mother of exiles, save them from wind and rage.

Mother of journeys, let the sea to be kind to them.²³

56.1 Later that evening, I stood before a small white building with tall grass on either side. Stenciled in green letters on the wall by the screen door were the words COLORED ENTRANCE, with an arrow pointing off to a side door. It was the first segregated eating establishment I’d ever found myself about to enter.

I was very hungry.

My last ride had innocently pointed it out as a place both good and cheap.

And I didn’t see anyplace else near it.

I stood there about two and a half minutes, deciding what to do. In this sun-soaked land, my complexion was ambiguous enough that I couldn’t see the point of going in the colored entrance unless I wanted to make some kind of statement. Only—did I want to make a statement, right at this moment?

I wanted something to eat.

Remembering the guy in the car (“… you look like you could have some colored blood in you …?”) I went through the unmarked (so presumably white) entrance and took a seat at the ten-foot counter—inside, there didn’t seem to be any particular colored section at the six-seat counter. The two Hispanic workmen eating either side of me were both substantially darker than I. A redheaded waitress took my order for a combination enchilada and taco plate, with rice and refried beans—and served me with a smile and a usual, “There you go. Enjoy that, now.”

It was very good.

56.2 And in Freeport, after not getting a ride for half an hour, Bob wandered back into town to linger on into evening, finally hooking up with some guys who were stalking from bar to bar, buying drinks for every one around; and, by two in the morning, had got himself pulled in, for drunk and disorderly, and kicked out on the road the next morning. …

Whatever the charges against him a year or two back, they’d long since been forgotten, he explained to me when we met up again on the docks of our destination.

I think he was disappointed.

23. Ibid., p. 22.

57. A dusty pickup let me off by the Aransas Pass waterfront. You could walk from one end of it to the other in ten minutes. I did, walked back, then went into a dark, clapboard hamburger place with a Coca-Cola sign nailed to one wall and a chewing tobacco advertisement on another, to get a soda and burger. Inside, a white-blond guy with dark-burned skin about my age loitered, shirtless, at one of the tables. I started up a conversation.

His name was Jake. Where was I from, he wanted to know.

Up north, I told him. (To say New York, I already knew, was often to set off a kind of unnecessary challenge.)

Why’d I come down here? There weren’t nothin’ to do in this little shit hole of a place.

I was looking for a job on the boats.

Well, that sure shouldn’t be too hard. Jake was workin’ on a boat, himself. Maybe if I stopped by later, his captain would tell me where I might best go. But all I really had to do was ask up and down the waterfront, and I would probably get one ’fore the day was out. The nigger boats was down at the other end, he told me knowingly.

I wasn’t sure if that meant I should try them or avoid them. But I figured this probably wasn’t the time either to make a stand or find out. And Jake was already asking, did I know any jokes?

Jokes? I’d never been very good at remembering jokes. But I brought out one. It was pretty lame, but it got a chuckle from Jake. Come on, he said, let’s go back to my boat. Captain’s off somewhere till this evening. But there’s a case of beer in the galley icebox. He won’t mind if we take one or two. Lemme tell you one, now.

The guy who was cook and waiter both said I could leave my guitar case behind the counter for a few hours, and it would be safe. I thanked him profusely.

“You play that thing?” Jake asked, as the heavy man in his apron lifted the dark case over. “Whyn’t you bring it along and maybe make us a little music?”

“Naw,” I said. “I don’t play that good. Besides, one of the strings is busted and I’ve got to get it fixed.” It was a lie. But after lugging that hard case more than fifteen hundred miles in four days (most of them, memory told me, full of rain and mud), I didn’t want to see it again for a few hours.

We went outside.

Sitting in the empty galley of Jake’s boat, we drank a beer apiece and swapped stories. Jake’s third was the one about the cocksucker who was working on the guy in the bushes, and after he finished, the guy looks down at him and say, “Okay, you sucked my dick, faggot. Now I’m gonna beat the shit out of you.” And the cocksucker looks up at him and says, “There’re two things I always liked. …” I frowned. But half the jokes Jake told that afternoon were ones Bob had told me on the subway, that first February evening, riding down from Bernie’s. I asked Jake a few questions about himself. He was twenty-five. He was from Georgia. Two of the last three years he’d spent in jail.

What had they got him for?

“Paper-hangin’. Shit, I had bad checks out all over Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi! But it was my first felony, so I got out after two, on parole.”

He was married and had a kid, but he wasn’t sure it was his. The wife was six years older than him—her third marriage, his first. But he’d just gotten sick and tired of arguin’ with her and had run off last month; now he was gonna work here on the boats for the summer. Maybe he’d go back some time … only he was afraid the law might still want him in the Georgia town he’d just left. And maybe, he added, looking at the electric alarm clock on the galley’s red linoleum counter with the aluminum catch rail running around the rim, you better take off, too. The captain’ll be back soon, and it wouldn’t do for him to catch a stranger sittin’ around and drinkin’ up his beer, you know what I mean? But if I didn’t find something, I should come on back and ask him. You know some good stories, too. I ain’t heard half the ones you told.

You know some good ones, too, I said. Thanks for the beer. Then I went out on the deck, jumped down on the dock, and started walking again.

The Sonnys of the world notwithstanding, neither Marilyn nor I had ever met anyone like Bob before. But here, in his own territory, I’d met a man within minutes who was Bob’s sociological twin. Thinking about it, I decided Bob was unique. But what was unique about him was that he’d read Moby Dick five times in jail—not jail itself; what was unique about him was his invention of two-sided tape; what was unique about him was his bravery in coming to New York at thirteen—not to mention his willingness to live in a three-way relationship as long as he—or any of us—had. But much of the rest, in which so much color had lain, I now knew had been dealt him in a hand as fixed in its form as that of any number of hoary jokes.

For now, though, with a dollar-eighty in my pocket, I had to find a job.

A bit down the piers, a blue pickup truck had pulled up to park. A middle-aged guy was pulling boxes from the back, and a younger guy was carrying them out across the dock and taking them on board.

Between them and me, a guy in his mid-twenties was perched on some bales, hugging his knees and looking down at me. His hair was brown and curly. He had no shirt. He was barefoot. And he was very dirty.

As I walked by, I stopped and said, “Hi!”

He nodded.

“You know where I can get a job?”

He came back with an answer in an accent so thick and local, I couldn’t catch a word. With one tarry hand, he reached out to point.

I let my eyes follow his forefinger—nail half black from some recent blow—among the slanted and dilapidated buildings across from the dock, to the back of the red brick supermarket I’d walked by coming down here. It didn’t mean too much. The one word I thought I could make out in his pronouncement was “fuckin” something. His smile, though, was friendly.

“I want to get a job,” I said again.

He answered again in his incomprehensible drawl. He pointed down at the notebook under my arm.

“Would you like to see it?” I asked, holding it up. “It’s only a notebook. …” My own diction was becoming clipped and precise in order to make myself clear, even as I realized he’d understand me better if I let my speech drift as far south as my father’s or even Bob’s.

He shook his head, still smiling, but with a kind of sadness, a kind of incomprehension. He said something else. Maybe it was that he didn’t know how to write. Or read. But I couldn’t tell.

Jake’s accent had been thick. But I hadn’t known there was American speech, still a form of English, this far from the intelligible. For a moment I thought of asking him where he was from, just to note it down. But then, I probably wouldn’t recognize the name.

“Thanks,” I said, doubtfully, and smiled. I had no idea what I was thanking him for, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Thank you.”

I walked on by the boats.

The beefy guy unloading his blue pickup wore a shirt clutched around the flanks by giant, sweaty palm prints. All the buttons were gone, and he’d tied the front corners across a rug of belly hair bulging above and below the knot.

The guy carrying the boxes by me onto the boat looked pretty much like the guy I’d just talked to. He was barefoot and shirtless in the lancing heat, back and shoulders burned dark as a penny. His hair was spikey; his hands were grimy. Another carton on his shoulder, he trudged by no more than two feet away, without glancing at me—though he had to have seen me.

Standing on the gray dockboards, I thought: Most popular person in the eighth grade …? The guy who can make friends with anyone …? But if I can’t understand him, what will it matter? Maybe I should try the guy at the truck? But even as I turned, the older guy finished setting the last carton down and went around to the pickup’s other side.

The younger guy stepped down from the boat rail again, and paused a moment to take a breath.

I took one too and said, “You’re working on the boat there?”

He looked at me, nodded.

I took another one. “Do you know if there’s any chance of my getting a job around here?”

He said, “There is if you want to work.” His accent was as northern as my own and could have come from any New England state university senior.

“Sure,” I said. “That’s what I’m looking for!”

He rubbed his sunburned neck and called over to the truck, “Hey, Elmer!”

The middle-aged guy with the hairy belly stood up, frowned across the cab’s blue roof, and rubbed his dripping forehead with the heel of his hand. “What you want?” Elmer’s accent was rich with Texas twang.

“We’ve got a guy here looking for a job.”

Elmer came back around the pickup to stand in front of me. He looked me up and down. “You wanna paint a boat deck, you got a job. We’ll see how you do paintin’; then maybe I’ll take you on as a header. I need a third man.”

“Thank you, sir!”

“You a northern boy, like Ron here?” Elmer grinned.

“That’s right. I’m looking to work here for the summer. On the boats.”

The grin became a grunt. “Ron’ll show you what to do. He’s my first mate.” Elmer turned back to the truck.

I was still not sure if I actually had a job. If I did, though, it had been simple.

Ron must have intuited my confusion. He said, “I guess you’re hired. Elmer’s the captain. It’s his boat. And what he says goes. My name’s Ron. Where you from?”

Elmer had gotten in the truck; the tires crunched over gravel and sparse grass. “See you boys tomorrow,” he called from the window.

I considered a moment. Then I said, “I’m from New York.”

“No shit!” Ron grinned. “I’m from New Jersey!”

The boxes they’d been loading were full of cans of white deck paint.

I spent the rest of the afternoon with Ron, painting the deck of Elmer’s seventy-two-foot shrimp runner dead lead white, leaving a gray strip to the door of the cabin. By six I’d discarded my shirt like every other male under forty on the Aransas docks. Standing a moment to thumb sweat out of my eyes, I saw Jake walking by the boats. “Hi!” I waved.

“Captain came back.” Jake grinned at me. “And I just got my fuckin’ ass fired!”

“What happened?”

“After you left, I drank up the rest of the fuckin’ beer. You know any place ’round here I can get a job?”

Ron stepped up beside me. “This boat’s full,” he said. “We got our three men. But you just ask around, up and down the docks, here. You’ll get on.”

Ron bought me dinner since Elmer had gone home. I slept in the boat that night.

The next day, near two o’clock, when I was walking up toward the hamburger place, I saw a familiar figure coming down the dirt path beside the supermarket. He looked at me, grinned, and declared, “Well, howdy, stranger …!”

And my experiment in exhaustiveness is done.