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Goodbye Ava
by Richard Bissell
Chapter One
I came out on the deck and looked around the harbor and over at the shipyard across the way and I certainly didn’t feel like going to work.
Just then Clyde came out the door of his houseboat which was about fifteen feet away from mine and he sat down on a timberhead and began to drink his coffee.
“Damn poor day to go to work,” I said.
“Yes,” he says. “Look at them sad deckhands over there wrastling that big old gasoline bilge pump. Makes a person all tired out just to watch, don’t it.”
“I might not go,” I said.
“No might about me. I plain ain’t,” he said.
Just then the screen door beside him flops open and out comes Rosalie. She was bare naked.
“God damn it, go on into the house and put some clothes on,” Clyde said.
“I’m goin thwimmin,” Rosalie says.
So she jumped into the harbor. Rosalie is nine years old.
A lot of people won’t swim in the harbor, but it just depends on which way the wind is blowing. If the wind is from the west everything keeps blowing out into the river and gets carried off down to St. Louis, Baton Rouge, and Havana, Cuba. But if it is blowing from the east, everything stays put and even a few new trophies come in from the river sometimes.
It is against the law so I hear to throw anything into any harbor in the U.S.A., but somehow the news hasn’t taken a very good hold here in Blue Rock. There is a shipyard, an oil dock and a grain elevator, twenty-three boathouses, five houseboats, a coal tipple, a marine ways, and a steamboat landing. And a lot of stuff kind of falls into the water by mistake from all these places. Such as cartons, papers, boards, lube oil cans, vinegar jugs, shingles, shoes, branches, busted oars, busted window sash, railroad ties, oil drums, oak wedges from the shipyard, bushel baskets, orange crates, watermelon rind, two by fours, greasy planks with spikes sticking out all over, nail kegs, hunks of cork, light bulbs — mostly anything that would float would come by if you waited long enough. That’s one of the nice things about living in a houseboat. Something you might need is likely to come drifting by any time.
“They ain’t going to miss me today,” Clyde said. “They are pouring concrete cement today.”
“I don’t care for that concrete,” I said.
“Me neither,” Clyde said. “If I have to work concrete, why then I will. But you know something?”
“What’s that?” I said.
“I’d rather stay clean away from all your concrete.”
“Concrete work?” I said. “Not for me. The hell with it.”
“I’m the same as you,” Clyde said. “You know something else?” “What else?” I said.
“I get the concrete poisoning. It swells me all up.”
“Oh hell,” I said.
“I ain’t kidding.”
Rosalie had found a light bulb, a good big one too, about 200 watts, must have come out of the engine room of some towboat. So she hauled off and threw it at the side of the houseboat and it busted with a big Pop! “When I was working on Kentucky Dam,” Clyde said, “one morning I woke up feeling funny . . .”
“Funny who?” I said. “Tell me all about it.”
“I was all kind of swelled-up like. Bummed a ride up to Paducah. Chiropractor he said to me he said, ‘It’s the concrete, son. It’s the concrete.’ ”
“Oh hell,” I said.
“That’s what the man said. What are you going to do, set right there and tell me he was wrong? You know how many yards of concrete we poured into that big dam?”
“Tell me,” I said. “I never heard it before. What dam was that?”
“Aw horse,” he said, and we sat there for a while watching Rosalie. Then her sister Sharon came out in the same costume and jumped into the harbor. She is about six I guess. And then out came Starlite who is eleven years old and on account of seniority she had on her underpants at least. She is a pretty cute kid except for having that name pinned on her. She hopped overboard too.
A switch engine with a couple of Burlington tank cars clanked by on the tracks at the top of the bank. The fireman gave me a wave. Beyond the tracks was the road that went down to the levee and one of those big oil transport trucks went aroaring by stirring up a cloud of dust. “Water sure is low,” Clyde said.
“I never saw it stay this low so long,” I said.
“Remember when we was in the flood on the Illinois?” he said.
“We had enough water to go around that time,” I said.
My dog Jake came up the gangplank and flopped down on the deck. He chewed on one of his feet for a while and then fell asleep.
“Gonna be a hot one,” Clyde said.
The leaves of the willows and the box elders on the bank just hung there, covered with dust from the trucks.
Jeri stuck her head out the door.
“You kids get the hell out of that river and come eat your breakfast,” she said.
Jeri was from Beardstown on the Illinois River. She had very white skin and very white teeth and very black hair. And a Shape that made you want to bust out crying. When Clyde married her she had the greatest body in the Illinois River valley from Grafton clear to Joliet. You can include Calumet and Chicago.
Clyde met her when we were deckhands together over on the old Montgomery, and he took her up to Peoria and married her when she was just sixteen.
“And you, what you fixing to do, warm that timberhead all day?” she said.
Her old man was kind of a half-ass commercial fisherman, boat-builder, and planner of very big deals. That’s one thing he had in common with Clyde. Man, to hear them talk. The things they were going to do. If only they had the capital. One time they were going to build a dry dock for all those big towboats. Another time the old man got the idea there was oil under the Illinois River; if only a person had a drilling rig he could get at that oil. After he got that oil flowing he’d build a refinery right there on the spot. Beardstown would be a boom town and he’d be all covered with oil from head to foot and he’d build a hotel, a motel, a swimming pool with underwater rainbow lighting and all painted blue inside, and a drive-in theater and a roller rink.
But what Jeri’s old man actually lived off of was a string of vending machines.
“Take your adult stops,” he was always telling me every time I saw him. “There’s the place to vend your pan candies. See a kid he goes for a machine with the charms mixed in with the fill.” “How’s that again?” I would say.
“But with the price of candy where it is at, who can afford to mix the charms in with the pan candies?”
“Search me,” I would say.
“Look at it another way,” he would say. “Your adult can throw down ten or more pieces of the candy and never feel nothing. But you can only eat one or two gum balls at a stretch. Am I right?”
Jeri’s old man lived in a trailer. And on top of it all he took Copenhagen.
“Honey, I don’t believe I’m going today,” Clyde said. “They are pouring concrete cement today.”
“Oh my God,” Jeri said and slammed the door.
“Here. You kids get outa that. Go and eat your breakfast,” Clyde said.
Across the harbor the Gertrude, a little old stern-wheeler, was nudging a couple of wood sand and gravel barges around, and the jingle-jangle of her engine room bells came drifting across the water. She was a real puffer, that Gertrude, and sure caused a lot of commotion for the amount of work she put out.
The kids climbed out of the water and went in the house dripping. Jake opened one eye to check up on things and dozed off again, satisfied that he wasn’t missing a thing.
Yes, it would be a hot one, all right. Already you could feel it dropping down all over the town and the harbor. By 11 a.m. it would be ninety, by 2 p.m. it would be a hundred and one. There we would be — Main Street and the lumberyards and the mills and the railroad yards and the Chamber of Commerce and the Marinello Beauty Shop and the Intimate Finance and Loan Co. and 50,000 people, all sitting in the middle of a great big skillet. And just a few months before our houseboats had been frozen in twentysix inches of ice and the thermometer up by the Burlington freight house showed thirty-two below zero.
“And that,” Clyde always said, “is what we like about it, boys. A little variety. First she fries us, then she freezes us. You can take your Florida and them orange bushes, you can take your California . . .”
“I’ll take either one,” Jeri would say. “But I can see I ain’t gonna get neither.”
Jake got up and slouched down the gangplank and flopped in the shade over on the bank. Down at the end of the harbor a Milwaukee freight train crawled south on a slow bell; there were five crossings in five blocks and she blew for all of them. Across at the shipyard somebody was hitting it up with a riveting hammer, and the steam crane over at the gravel dump was shooshing and snorting. Out in the channel one of the big line towboats with about fifteen barges of coal blew a big long blast for the drawbridge.
“How you can stand those rats!” my mother was constantly saying.
“They behave themselves,” I would tell her. “They stay up on the bank. Now those water bugs you have under your kitchen sink . . .”
“Nothing of the kind.”
“Those big red devils about three inches long. We haven’t got those down in the harbor.”
“And that friend of yours. I’m glad your father isn’t here to . . .”
Well there are a lot of very ‘lovely homes’, as Mother would say, up on Western Boulevard, some of them Dutch colonial, others with towers, cupolas, and art glass windows at the stair landings, not to mention several thousand new ranch-type homes for all the local ranchers, but you know what? I like it better down here in the harbor. And I am sure glad my old man is not here, like Mother says, to argue with me about it and tell me I ought to join the Lions Club and settle down.
What everybody in the State of Iowa would like to see me do is marry some good peppy girl with a degree in baton twirling from the University of Wisconsin or Iowa State Teachers College at Cedar Falls, and cuddle up behind the picture window in a nice split-level.
Well to quote Clyde:
“I ain’t about to.”
Everybody uptown they think that down here in the harbor we are all crazy. Well I think everybody uptown is crazy. So that makes us even.
