The Runner Read online

  Bullet didn’t answer. Patrice often teased him this way and there wasn’t anything he needed to say in answer. It was just the way Patrice got around to talking about something he wanted to talk about.

  “You know, traditionally, the barbarian has swept over the civilized world,” Patrice said now. “Goths—or Visigoths—or Ostrogoths—and the Vandals, and the Huns. Poor old Rome, like a kitchen floor, swept and swept, don’t you think? The Achaians at Troy. The Vikings along the coasts of Ireland and England and France.”

  “Are there any barbarians left?” Bullet wondered.

  Patrice shrugged. “Can a man tell about the history he lives in? The enemy is always the barbarian, just as God is always on my side. The blacks in Africa, perhaps they are.”

  “Come off it.”

  “Tall, strong and splendid—warrior races? You are thinking too narrowly, you must look out for that. Picture him, his dark skin gleaming, bare feet, and his body hung with jewelry made out of the bones of his prey, he moves through the long grass. A spear held high, only a skin shield to protect him. He stands before an elephant. If he kills the beast, he is a hero. If he dies—all a man asks is to die well, to die in good battle and bravely; he is a hero.”

  “You’re prettying it up,” Bullet said.

  “But of course, this is speculative thought.”

  “You ought to come to school and see what they’re really like.”

  “If I did, I might not agree with you about what they’re really like. And there’s you—you’re a barbarian—out of your time. But you will have trouble, being only one. It is hard for one to overrun.”

  Bullet guessed he knew what Patrice meant, and he didn’t mind it. He’d always known how different he was, and he’d never minded.

  “You’re pleased,” Patrice observed. “I have paid you a compliment?” The gnome face looked as if it wanted to laugh.

  “You have,” Bullet told him. “You know, you don’t talk like you’re uneducated.”

  “But why should I. I have been to school. I was even going to go on, in school.”

  “What happened?”

  Patrice shrugged. “The Germans came.”

  “And?”

  “I no longer went to school. Finish your coffee and get on with your work. I’ll save the last roll for you.”

  Bullet did as he was told, he never minded doing what Patrice told him. He’d learned that Patrice only told him what was necessary. Bullet stood up to get the tongs. He lifted the lid of the basket and looked down at the quiet mass of crabs. He tonged one out and turned it over, to see by the apron whether it was male or female. They sold females to the packing houses, the different sizes all jumbled in together. It was the jimmies, the males over six inches from point to point, that they were really after, but as long as a crab was of the legal size they could use it. This one was a male, barely five inches, and he tossed it into the basket for the small males.

  Behind him he heard Patrice move to stand in the small shaded rectangle made by the cabin. He knew how his employer would look, leaning against the cabin wall, a mug in his hand, his eyes watching Bullet cull the catch. He’d always let Bullet do the culling and never griped at any mistakes. A couple of times, at first, Bullet had tossed big jimmies overboard, watching them arc out over the water, listening for any sound from behind him that Patrice had seen the loss. Finally, getting no reaction, he had flipped one that must have been seven and a half inches, maybe even eight, really big. He’d waited, to see what the explosion would be like. But he’d heard only a chuckle, and then Patrice had spoken behind him. “I cannot bear to watch, you are on your own.” Bullet had turned around, angry at the laughter in the man’s voice; but Patrice was already walking away, to lift the cover up and take a look at the engine.

  Sometimes Bullet wondered why Patrice had put up with him at first, but he never asked. He just kept coming to work, feeling himself ease up as soon as he stepped over the picket fence into Patrice’s yard. He didn’t mind Patrice, and Patrice didn’t mind him; they did all right together.

  Bullet worked fast, tonging, turning, tossing either into a basket or overboard. The crabs were stirred up now, moving around over one another, spitting, clacking their claws. As he held each up, it swam with its legs in unresponsive air. He tonged in and sorted, ignoring the most aggressive ones for a while. These backed away from the tongs, pincers upraised, legs scurrying for footholds on the wet and moving mass beneath. He gave them time to settle down while he picked out another. Once they had settled down, folding their claws in together, he picked one out quickly. They would take the jimmies down to the dock to sell by the bushel at whatever the day’s price was. Buyers from the small crab houses all over the eastern shore came to the docks at about lunchtime; Patrice preferred to sell to them because he got a better price. At this time of year, however, he would probably have to sell to the wholesalers, and they would make less.

  Bullet bent to dip into the basket, straightened to toss the crab overboard, bent again to dip again. There was a rhythm to this job, governed by the movement of his arm, like scything through a field of hay. Behind him, Patrice stood watching, watching Bullet do the job right. Until the culling was done, they couldn’t tell what the harvest of the catch actually was.

  “Looks like a couple dozen,” Bullet reported. “Not too terrific.” He corroborated the expression on Patrice’s face.

  Patrice handed him the roll, slathered with butter. Bullet bit into it, hungry again. “It is early days. We’ll see how the runs go. Maybe it’s time to start for oysters.”

  “It’s pretty warm still.”

  “You prefer when we oyster in the winter?” Patrice raised his eyebrows.

  Bullet knew he was teasing. “Frankly, I prefer crabbing. Oystering is hard work.”

  “It’s all hard work. You’re young and strong. I’m old and wily. Hard work doesn’t hurt us.”

  “I didn’t say it did,” Bullet pointed out.

  “No, you didn’t,” Patrice agreed. “Ready now?”

  CHAPTER 6

  After all, it was a fair catch for the seven hours of work: three bushels of big jimmies and five for the canning firms, which they sold at the town dock just after noon. Bullet’s share came to fifty dollars, a quarter of the take. It was after one by the time they had berthed Fraternité at the dock in front of Patrice’s house, hosed her down, checked gas and oil in the engine, rebaited the trotline, and coiled it into the plastic garbage can at the stern. Once, Bullet had asked Patrice why he had named his boat Fraternité. Most of the workboats had women’s names, Loralee, Helen, Polly, Zena. Patrice had just smiled like some old gnome who had lived a hundred years and shrugged. “And you spelled it wrong,” Bullet pointed out. Patrice laughed and explained about the old motto. “Liberté and egalité,” he said, teasing, “they are the ideal. But Fraternité is humanly possible. I make my statement,” he said.

  It was weird, but Bullet didn’t mind. Patrice played with ideas, speculative thought, he called it. He was always thinking about something, and he liked it when Bullet listened, but he didn’t try to make him pay attention. Patrice didn’t even care about being right. He didn’t, Bullet thought, following his employer down the long dock, care about much of anything. About thinking, and he liked to eat, he cared about food, and he liked Bullet, liked having him around. Patrice was free, which meant he made his own rules and followed them. Bullet admired him.

  Besides, Patrice didn’t think like anybody else, he always had some odd angle. Once, a few years ago—it was right after Liza left, that was when it was—Bullet had been working away, doing something, and brought down a stack of baskets so hard half of them were smashed. He felt better, for a few minutes, less burned up. Then he wondered if Patrice had seen and turned around to catch the anxious eyes looking at him. Go ahead, fire me, you’ll never get anyone who can work as hard as I can, Bullet had thought, bracing himself. But Patrice wasn’t angry. He wasn’t frightened either, or threatened. “
You are so angry, my friend,” he had said.

  “So what?” Bullet demanded.

  “What makes you so angry?”

  “None of your business,” Bullet had said.

  “Granted. But when someone like you is angry, I am interested in what causes it.”

  “I’m angry most of the time,” Bullet told Patrice.

  “Yes? Why?”

  “People, the way they act. Things, the way they are.”

  Patrice nodded his head once, on an ah-sound, and turned back to the motor.

  “I’ll fix the baskets,” Bullet told him.

  “Do you know how?”

  “No, but I can figure it out.”

  “I’ll show you. Later. Now we have work to do.”

  “You’re a real slave driver, Patrice,” Bullet had said.

  His employer laughed out loud. “Me? I think not. I can’t be. If I am, you’re the worst slave in the history of man’s injustice to man.”

  Bullet had grinned, and turned to picking up the splintered mess he had made. And he had fixed the baskets too. Patrice had shown him how, then had left him to do it.

  While Patrice made lunch, Bullet took a long, hot shower. They didn’t have a shower at home, only a big old tub with claw feet. When he emerged from the bathroom attached to the back of the one-room house, he wandered around the little yard while Patrice washed up.

  Patrice had no grass, no garden, and only one little pine growing in the clayey soil. A low picket fence surrounded the plot of land that he rented, its white paint bright and clean. The yard was crammed with outboards and dinghys, each at some different stage of repair. Patrice bought or salvaged these boats and motors, fixed them up and sold them at a profit. That day, he had three boats, the longest fourteen feet, lying upside down in a row, on top of logs. Several motors, from three to twenty horsepower, lay around. Some of them had the casing off and the parts spread out—spark plugs, pull cords, propeller blades. It looked messy but was, Bullet knew, kept neatly, as neatly as the cabinets inside where Patrice stored his paint and tools and spare parts.

  They ate inside, at the card table. Patrice had made a thick potato soup, which he served with sandwiches made out of the rolls, split and stuffed with meat he had chopped and mixed together with boiled eggs, olives, and green peppers. They ate without speaking, until they were full. Patrice poured himself fresh coffee. Bullet refilled his glass from the tap. Patrice lit a thin cigar.

  “All the same, we will be oystering soon. I should take down the tongs this week.”

  Bullet looked up to where Patrice kept his oyster tongs, hung on the wall. Their twelve-foot handles and thick, stubby rakes looked as heavy as he knew they were. The metal of the teeth glowed with the careful cleaning Patrice and he had given them at the end of last winter’s season. “Okay,” he said.

  “Such enthusiasm,” Patrice said.

  Bullet changed the subject. “You got a new boat.”

  “I found her washed up into the marshes. She looked salvageable.”

  Bullet snorted: “It looks to me like you’ll be replacing more than half the thing.”

  “So? Did you also notice she is not so broad as most fourteen-footers? She would have been a fast little boat.”

  Bullet just shook his head. Patrice always salvaged and rebuilt. He threw nothing away. He worked with metal and wood, soldering, sawing, refitting. “What else is there for a man to do in the evenings?” he asked. He didn’t expect an answer.

  Evenings, Bullet’s father read books, silent at his desk, alone in the living room with the door closed. His mother baked, preserved, knitted, sewed, cleaned. Bullet stayed away: Most evenings of the year he ran; in winter he withdrew upstairs right after dinner, up to the second floor he now had entirely to himself. The other two bedrooms were empty except for furniture; the first thing his mother did, after Johnny left, after Liza left, was take their stuff up to the attic. Winter evenings, when it was too cold to run, Bullet went up to his room and did nothing. He could have done homework during the winter, but he never did it at any other time and couldn’t think of any reason to make an exception for winter.

  Johnny, he remembered, would be in the kitchen, building something or looking at library books with plans, or doing his homework, or reading. Liza might help their mother, or sing at the piano if the old man wasn’t around; sometimes she would play checkers with Bullet. She always lost. Even at Parcheesi she always lost. And Johnny always won—well, he was years older, bigger, smarter, faster. He could always make Bullet do what he told him. He wouldn’t mind taking Johnny on now, Bullet thought, I could hold my own and maybe then some.

  He bit into another of Patrice’s sandwiches, almost wishing Johnny was still around, to show. But that was all before, anyway, before Johnny started locking horns with the old man. As Johnny got older, it was like that, like two bulls in one yard. Dinners, year after year, night piled up on night, and the old man always got the last word. Except about college, and then it was their mother who tipped the scales.

  “There’s nothing you can’t learn here,” their father kept telling Johnny, “while you learn how to work the farm that’ll keep you in food.”

  “You just don’t know,” Johnny had answered. “You don’t even know how much you don’t know, even about farming.”

  The old man chewed on that one for a while, while everybody sat quiet. “Children always think they know better. They never do. You’ll be staying here, and if you’ve got the character, you’ll study,” he finally said.

  “You haven’t got any say in it, not anymore,” Johnny told him. “I’ve got a scholarship, I don’t need anything from you.”

  “I don’t see you putting your own food on your own plate,” the old man said.

  “You know what I mean,” Johnny muttered.

  “I know how unrealistic you are,” the old man said.

  “I’m going,” Johnny said, stubborn.

  “College is a luxury, and we can’t afford luxuries,” the old man told him.

  “I’m going,” Johnny said.

  Finally, Bullet’s mother broke in. “Then go, and let’s have this question settled. Unless you settle to stay.”

  Johnny looked at her: “You want me to go, don’t you?”

  Her mouth moved, but no words came out. Liza’s fat tears spilled out of her eyes, but she didn’t say anything. Bullet knew his mother didn’t want Johnny to go, not the way the two of them were using that word, to mean go away and stay away. “Yes,” she finally said, “go.”

  Bullet opened his mouth to stop Johnny, who was scraping his chair away from the table, but she said, “You, boy, keep your mouth closed.”

  Johnny looked at her again, at that, but he didn’t know what she meant, and he was supposed to be so smart; even Liza knew what she meant, and the old man sat smug and smiling tight at his end of the table. Johnny went, figuring he’d won out after all, and the old man figured he’d won out, and Bullet knew then it didn’t do any good to be smart, that being smart didn’t keep people from boxing you in. The two of them, they’d boxed her in, and they’d boxed themselves in. But nobody was going to get Bullet that way, he made up his mind to that.

  “But, Pop,” he remembered Liza starting to say. Bullet kicked her hard, in the shin, and she looked at him then and shut up. Which was what he wanted her to do.

  He thought, finishing the sandwich, finishing up his bowl of soup, his belly full now, that if he’d been Liza he’d have kicked him back. But Liza didn’t. Maybe she knew how useless it was, anyway. He never could tell what Liza knew, anyway. That night she had just got up to clear the table and help with the dishes—which was what Bullet did now, too. He took the plates and bowls and piled them by the sink. Patrice finished his coffee, then—holding the cigar between his teeth—offered, “Let me show you what I’ll do with her.” They went back outside to look at the fourteen-footer.

  It had once been painted, but the coats had worn down to a dusting of colorlessness over
the weathered boards. It looked as gray as a dock. Gaping holes had been smashed through its floorboards.

  Patrice put his hand on the curiously rounded keel. “This is called carvel-planking,” he told Bullet, his palm following the curved line of wood back to the curved transom. The planks on the sides, except for a couple of places, looked okay, but the gunwales were mashed down, sprung loose as the ribs of the boat had twisted with whatever strain it had been subjected to. The transom was useless, split down its center.

  “Even you can’t do much with this,” Bullet said.

  Patrice leaned forward to pull one of the floorboards up. “I will enjoy trying. See how they are grooved to fit? Beautiful. It must have been rough weather to damage something this well made.”

  “You think maybe it floated up from the ocean?”

  “No, the ocean would have broken up even this boat. The ribs are sound, and the sides. I’ll replank the bottom. I’ve never attempted such work—” and Patrice was off, talking about the steps of it, cutting the length to match, cutting the board to square, then planing it down to the right curve to run from stern to bow. Bullet listened with half an ear, he wasn’t interested. Patrice just liked talking. He didn’t mind that, and Patrice didn’t mind if he listened or not. “I’ll need to find some oak,” Patrice concluded.

  “That’ll cost you.”

  Patrice shrugged.

  “Planing it yourself will take hours. You’ll never make your money back on it, Patrice.”

  “Oh well, I’ll have put real work into it, and that is something too.”

  “Besides, who has the money for a dinghy like that, anyway?”

  “She’ll take fifteen horses when I finish with her. Can you see how she’ll look? White, clean and white, with maybe a blue stripe showing at the waterline. I’ll let you help with the painting.”

  “You’re going to paint oak?”

  “Sometimes a man just wants to do the best he is capable of. And why do you yourself run your races, do you ever think of that?”