Part Thirty

My pop, Pete Green Senior, was a real cowboy. Everybody here called him Big Pete – he wasn’t that big, kind of wiry actually, but they called him that to distinguish him from me. Me, they still call Little Pete, even though… well, look at me. Six-two and a few too many cheeseburgers.

But Big Pete grew up in Oklahoma in the 40s and was a cowboy early, because everybody else was busy fighting World War II. The war ended when Pop was 15. Soldiers started coming back, and ranching was already sort of a marginal proposition, and so Pop said he was hard pressed to see much of a future in Oklahoma for himself.

I think there was a girl, too. You know how that goes.

So anyhow he goes out to Hollywood because he had an uncle, Uncle Gee, they called him, who was a horse wrangler for a movie studio. And Uncle Gee gave Pop a job. You know, the late 40s, early 50s, they were still making a lot of westerns. And Pop started hanging out with some of the stuntmen, and they started having him show the actors how to look a little more like a cowboy. How to sit a horse, get the rig right, things like that. One of the stuntmen showed him how to do a quick draw and Pop had a real aptitude for it. And by 1955, 1956, Big Pete was working as a sort of cowboy trainer. Movies and then TV shows. He showed James Arness how to draw for Gunsmoke.

He met my mom. She was an actress. You never heard of her. She was in half-a-dozen pictures. She tended to play the ex-girlfriend or the pretty but dimwitted sister.

She died when I was little.

After while they weren’t making many Westerns. I was getting to be a teenager and my Pop decided he didn’t want me growing up in LA. So he took the money he’d saved and bought this place, 20,000 acres of scrub in southwest New Mexico. He was going to go back to cattle ranching. Called the place the Bar Nothing, and that’s still our brand – a bar and a zero.

But it wasn’t any more profitable then. I went to high school and he taught me how to be a cowboy and I went to college and he tried to sell the place. But nobody else was crazy enough to buy it.

Then in like 1980, 1981, something like that, a bunch of guys from Germany decided to make a Western. And they came out here and rented some land and built a little clapboard town, one with a surprising amount of historical accuracy, actually. Called it Greenville, after us. And they hired Pop to train all their actors, and actresses, too. We put them up in the bunkhouse. And that was the only year the ranch made any money – the year we hosted those Germans. So that got Pop to thinking that maybe he could sell the place to one of his old Hollywood pals, because, like he said, they all had more money than sense. So he worked a few of his old connections.

And what happened was that these old directors and writers and actors would come out, and say the same thing, in different ways: good to see you again, Pete, nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.

Still, it paid off in one way, because everybody saw the little town and all this empty space with no power lines and we got used in some other films. Couple of mini-series, a few other foreign films; whenever someone wanted to do a Western, they would think about shooting at the Bar Nothing. And hire Big Pete to train them. Once I got out of school I would pick up some money working as a wrangler and an extra.

I was teaching high school history over in Darby. That’s the nearest real town.

Anyhow, we’re losing money raising cattle and making money playing nursemaid to a bunch of pretty-boy actors who want to learn how to look like a cowboy in two weeks. And renting out Greenville, and after each film the town is a little bit bigger, a little bit more fully fleshed out. And one day it hits my old man – dude ranch. Actually, he read an article in Reader’s Digest about Williamsburg, Virginia, and that was his inspiration. He wanted to build, not just a dude ranch, but a cowboy Williamsburg. He called some of the same rich Hollywood types and they backed him, and the Bar Nothing has been very, very profitable ever since. I quit teaching and went back to school – studied hotel and restaurant management at UNLV – and when Big Pete died a couple years ago I took charge of the Greenville/Bar Nothing Historic Resort.

My pop was, in his own way, a visionary, I guess.

So, right, Preacher Haywood. I met him when my first wife and I went to Seattle on vacation. And we stopped by this restaurant being run by one of my old friends from UNLV, Sarah Douglas. Have you ever met him? Preacher? I mean, how could you not like the guy? Smart, personable, funny, hard-working. I told him, you ever want to get out of the rain, come down to New Mexico with me and I’ll have a job for you.

And damned if he didn’t show up on my doorstep a few months later.

Part Twenty Nine

They buy the diner. Susan puts together sketches and schemes and color swatches, just as she does each time they redo the Wine Dark Sea. And Sarah and Preacher are properly impressed and deferential and do exactly what she hoped they would do: proceed to tear it apart and present their own ideas. They want to avoid nostalgia industry. They want something timeless. They want something that evokes history but has a modern stamp.

Preacher programs the juke box. Bob Marley. The Clash. Robert Johnson. Bruce Springsteen. Marvin Gaye. A fistful of old Sun records. Sleepy LaBeef. Bo Diddley. Leadbelly. Woody AND Arlo Guthrie. Bob Dylan. The Boomtown Rats. The Motels. The Cars. Nirvana, of course. And Soundgarden. And the Flying Burrito Brothers. And Small Faces. Rolling Stones. Marshall Crenshaw. Eagles. Aerosmith, somewhat incongruously. The Pretty Things. The 13^th Floor Elevators.

There is a sandwich on the menu called the Haywood: two slices of rye bread, buttered and lightly salted, with thick slices of Edam cheese covered by a few apple slices, grilled on both sides.

The music is always loud there, the colors vibrant; the food is hot and greasy and filling.

The cheeseburger is called the Gus.

The margins are thin -- they keep menu prices deliberately low -- but the place is always packed, mostly with U-Dub students.

The houseboat is another world to them. They keep it quiet; Preacher may sometimes listen to music on the tiny stereo (bluegrass, when she’s not present; she can’t abide it), the volume turned down low. No TV. It is a little cramped, and quiet, and after a very short time he, too, cannot sleep if he cannot hear the lap of waves and the creak of old wood.

When they come home they peel off their clothes as soon as they are below. They want to leave the smell of smoke and french-fries behind. They go into the shower together and soap one another -- they have different soaps, each grabs the other's. The shower on a houseboat is not really large enough for the two of them, certainly not large enough to accommodate the two of them in any activity other than showering, but they steal a few kisses along the way. They emerge feeling as if they have put their work far away.

This ablution is important to them; they are born again each time, baptized from their public selves to their private selves, from employer-employee to lovers. She puts on whichever half of her pajamas is at hand; Preacher has boxers he might wear, or gray sweatpants that say Dulaney on them if it is colder. She brushes her hair and Preacher climbs into bed. They talk about things, not work-things, other-things; he might just tell her how beautiful she is, something she has not heard often in her life, or he might tell her about a place he lived; she might tell him about an old friend she'd not thought of in years, or a song she heard on the radio. This is a form of fore-foreplay for them, even more so than the shower. They don't analyze this.

He is the type who could, but she is not the type to whom he would, quote Rilke, “See how in their veins all becomes spirit;/into each other they mature and grow”; she is not the type who would even be comfortable knowing that her lover thought in that way. She clambers into the smallish bed with him and turns out the light and presses her face against his chest and breathes in; Ivory soap is part of the smell of him, and something faintly like cinnamon, and... aspen leaves? She cannot describe it, but she finds it heady. He strokes her hair; this is how it always begins, when he strokes her hair in that way. Every strand is familiar to him. She suffers a brief, sensation of being a violin, her pegs turned a hairsbreadth before the bow is drawn.

Her mouth strokes the soft skin of his belly; he draws his other hand across her skin, lightly, and she feels fine hairs rise on her forearms. And she straightens to bring her mouth closer to his. There is something about his kiss that pulls; she cannot describe it any other way, it pulls something from her, it draws her into him. He has said to her, in the past: you penetrate me, too. But she is not sure about this. This is why she always turns out the lights. When she can see his eyes she sometimes thinks she sees something... close down. Like closing the door to a furnace; the heat is still there, but the light goes out. But with the room dark out she does not notice this. She notices instead the script his fingers trace on her skin; she notices instead the warmth and fullness and closeness of him; by the time he is inside her the taste of his skin and the sound of his breath alone are almost more than she can bear. On this night he is slow and deliberate and his hand strokes her cheek and the curve of her jaw as he kisses her, and the first time she comes it is sharp and sudden, and the second time it is slow and shuddering, and finally she struggles to draw enough breath to give voice to the cascading chords her body sounds, taut then unbound in rolling succession like the slurred pop of the waves against the boat. When her arms begin to ache from squeezing him and the tiny implosions are too much to bear and his kisses have pulled her all the way into him he lets go, and she feels that release, too, and they have done it right because each has felt the other.

He's the sort who doesn't even mind sleeping in the wet spot.

In the morning they do it again, just because. When the sunlight fills the cabin, though, she opts for something that takes his eyes from her view; he calls it “Aibha,” but she doesn’t bother to learn the fancy names he has for these things. She just knows she likes it.

In case you’re wondering: he has told her he loves her. And she has returned the sentiment.

He still works the occasional shift at the Wine Dark Sea; he has refused title or promotion, although he is a de facto assistant manager of both facilities. He earns more in tips at the Sea, of course. Jimmy is teaching him more about cooking, about the difference between cooking in your kitchen and cooking in a restaurant. He picks up some basic technique, chopping, sautéing, that sort of competent sure-handedness in the kitchen that makes even an indifferent chef appear to know what he's doing.

The businesses thrive. They laugh at a man who comes to see them about franchising Gus’s; it won’t work as a franchise, they tell him. How do you franchise keeping the place loud when it should be loud, quiet when it should be quiet? How to describe the right volume for the music? How do you write a manual about the waitstaff bickering with the grill cook, loudly, in front of the guests? The food is “sophisticated diner” but served at truck-stop prices, so the joint only makes money if it stays packed. It stays packed in part because the kids know it’s one-of-a-kind, authentic, not just another TGIFridays. Because it is controlled chaos. Because the staff learns everyone’s names. Because they keep enough vegetarian stuff on the menu. Because they are open (after the first month) 24/7. You can go there late in the morning for beignets and coffee and get some reading done; you can go there late at night and yell to be heard.

You can’t franchise it. The Douglases won’t admit it, but they aren’t sure if it would be at all possible without Haywood; he remembers everyone’s name, the regulars ask for him, he brings them food they haven’t ordered and they eat it and pay for it because Preacher wouldn’t steer them wrong.

(Some of the girls and a few of the boys flirt with him; he flirts back; to her own surprise, Sarah finds this funny, not threatening.)

In March of 1991 Preacher and Sarah both take off at the same time and go visit one of her cousins in Redland. There’s a new baby in the house. Preacher makes all the appreciative noises. Plays with abandon with their three-year-old. Sarah is not surprised that he’s good with kids; she’s just a little surprised that she couldn’t recall him ever showing any interest in one at all before that time.

They don’t discuss it. But a few days later she comes home and he says to her: I need to talk to you about something important.

She is dripping from the shower. OK, she says. She thinks she knows where this is going.

I have been so happy, he says. Here. With you. I love you, and my work, and your folks, and even this rainy city.

I love you, too, she said, and you’ve made me happy, too.

There’s really nothing else I could want, he said, except…

She hopes it is a giant rock, the sort of thing that will put her cousin’s 1 karat, off-color thing to shame.

Except that there is more, there is more for both of us, and there’s no sense in putting that off another minute.

She wonders where he is hiding it. Will he get on one knee? She hoped not. That was so… clichéd.

So, he says, his face wet, I have to leave.

There is a long silence, in which she almost says “yes.”

What, she says. There is no question mark at the end.

I feel so… so bad, he says to her, looking her in the eye. That I am not able to be… that I can’t be your… I wish that our future was together, I wish that I could give you all the things that you should have, a family and a future and… and everything. But I can’t. This is not my future. It should be, I want it to be, but it’s not.

What? There is a question mark that time. A threatening one.

I wish I could explain it better, he said. I can’t. I wish you could talk me into staying. You can’t. I don’t want to have to go. But I do.

He stood.

I hate the fact that you’re going to hate me now. I hate the fact that I have wasted your time and… and… I hope that there is a time when you are finished hating me, a time when you are with someone else and happy and glad, in fact, that I left to open the way for all that. And after that happens, if you are finished hating me, I hope that you can remember some good things about this time.

She grabs his arm, she cries, she threatens, she curses. Desperate, she demands two weeks’ notice. He leaves with the same knapsack he had when he moved in – a couple shirts, jeans, toothbrush, alternative shoes.

Years later she is married with kids and happy. Gus’s faltered a bit but picked back up again. Preacher’s prediction seems to have come true – once she stopped hating him, she remembers those days fondly. Susan, however, won’t mention his name. Just glares when asked about him. Kevin… Kevin won’t admit it, but on some level he keeps thinking this was just a phase and Preacher will be back.

Sarah and her husband and child are ritual Worshippers. Kevin and Susan have read the book.

Part Twenty Eight

It is the summer of 1990.

Kevin stares at the ceiling while she gets ready for bed. And he says to Susan: I miss my restaurant.

Susan says to him, I knew you would.

Kevin handles the kitchen, including all the food, all the wine, and Jimmy. Sarah handles the front – waiters, tables, busboys, personnel. Susan handles finances (an artifact of the days when her parents fronted the money) and “atmosphere,” which includes everything from the lighting to the design of the menus. Either Kevin or Sarah or both are in the restaurant virtually every hour it is open, greeting guests, glaring at runners, keeping the waiters sharp. Sarah has proven that she is perfectly capable of handling things. Kevin doesn’t know what to do with his newfound time. Doesn’t know how to react to a waiter he hasn’t hired.

Kevin says to Susan: I can’t believe Preacher has been here less than a year. He’s good.

Susan agrees that he is good, and wonders what her husband is plotting.

Do you think he’s going to marry our daughter?

Would you have married me if my parents hadn’t made you?

Eventually. He laughs

Liar, she laughs back. Do you think it’s that serious?

He shrugs. You’re her mother. What does she say?

Nothing, she says. Why would she tell her mother? She got into bed next to him.

Think there’s a subtle way I can ask him what his… intentions are?

Don’t you dare, she says, turning to him and frowning.

Nothing obvious, Kevin protests, just, maybe, I could ask him…

Kevin, I swear to God, if you even HINT at anything like that I will kill you. The last thing your daughter needs is to have her father leaning on one of his employees to marry her.

He is silent to a moment. I guess you’re right.

Don’t even THINK about it, she says, arching one eyebrow. What’s got into you?

I’m thinking about… remember Gus’s?

That horrible little diner next to the campus?

Yeah.

Didn’t we used to call that place Chez Ptomaine?

Yeah, that’s the place.

What about it?

Gus died.

Recently? Jesus, he was a hundred when WE were in college.

If there was a way to make Pepsi fried and greasy, Gus would have done it. He wore the same stained white tee-shirt beneath his apron every day. When he cooked he slammed the food on the plate angrily. His daughter Myrna, an enormous woman who shared Gus’s disposition, would slam the plate on the counter in front of the customer just as angrily.

When we were in college, he was the same age we are now, Kevin says. Remember Myrna? Myrna’s daughter inherited the property.

Susan closes her eye in a half-wince. Thanks. I didn’t feel old enough.

Anyhow, what would you think about opening a second restaurant?

There? At Gus’s?

Something fun and hip. Someplace where the kids can get affordable real food. Someplace with a juke box.

Someplace where you can send Sarah and Preacher so you can have the Wine Dark Sea back.

I hadn’t really thought of it like that.

Liar.

No, really.

Big fat liar, she says, kissing him.

That would be perfect for them, though, he says thoughtfully.

Like this just occurred to you now. She slips her hand under the covers.

He laughs and reaches for the light.

No, she said, leave it on. Otherwise I’ll keep imagining getting humped by old Gus.

He chuckled at the memory of the sour-faced man standing at his grill, flipping cheeseburgers, with his crew-cut and ubiquitous Lucky Strikes.

And left the light on. And afterwards she curls up against his chest and coos:

Oh, Gus.

Part Twenty Seven

In 1964 Kevin Douglas knocked up his girlfriend, an art major at U-Dub named Susan Frey. Kevin was a poli-sci major himself.

Kevin was more devoted to not being drafted than to Rousseau, it’s safe to say. The arrival of little Sarah Ruth Douglas on the scene accomplished the same thing and the moment he held her in his arms he decided it was something he should have done a long time ago.

Now if he could just find a job…

Susan said to him, baby, do what you want to do. Follow your heart. But also put food on the table for your little girl. Since she’d let him override her choice of names (Burning Freedom Douglas had such a nice ring to it, she thought) he figured he’d better listen to her.

What he wanted to do… what he wanted to do… he walked around campus and through Seattle and realized that the thing he enjoyed most at school – aside from Susan – was cooking dinner for his friends. Nobody had any money for restaurants and besides, their hair was getting longer and their clothes scruffier as the Sixties progressed, and so it was getting harder and harder to get served…

He looked up and he was in a part of Seattle that consisted largely of warehouses and longshoreman’s bars. And there just a few hundred feet from the Sound was a ramshackle building whose owner was trying to sell it before the city condemned it.

Susan and Kevin went to her parents and negotiated a compromise: they would get married, if her parents would pay for a big wedding… except they would get married at the courthouse and use the wedding money for the down payment on their new restaurant.

For some reason the Freys went for it, and the Wine Dark Sea was born. The building’s owner even threw in the about-to-sink houseboat foundering at the pier behind the about-to-be-condemned warehouse. And thought he had put one over on the young couple, who (he thought) would now get stuck with the bill for having the wreck hauled away.

But somehow they got the building fixed up. And the boat, too. And Susan created a whole visual experience for the restaurant to go with the menu, which was heavy on seafood and other regional ingredients, and always had plenty of vegetarian dishes. At first the Wine Dark Sea served an uneasy mix of stevedores and college students but eventually the mix got easier. They moved out of the houseboat and it became the home of the first chef they hired who wasn’t Kevin. And the neighborhood changed throughout the Seventies, and ever few years Susan would completely remake the look of the place, and the menu got more sophisticated, and the dockworkers stopped coming around as much, and so did the college students, both replaced by a lot more people with a lot more money…

Kevin and Susan pretended for the longest time that they were still, at heart, just cooking dinner for their long-hair friends. But when Sarah came back from college and her internship at a three-star restaurant in France she pointed out to her parents that they did, in fact, own and operate a fancy restaurant.

Kevin’s first impulse was to sell his Mercedes, but he sublimated that into a practice of hiring vagrants for non-existent jobs, which is where Preacher Haywood comes into the story.

It is a crisp (for Seattle) fall day in 1989 and at first light Kevin goes to the fish market and meets up with Jimmy Raines, the current head chef at Wine Dark. They inspect the day’s options. And both of them notice that there is young man standing there, drinking a cup of coffee, and just watching. They don’t recognize him, he’s not with any restaurant or vendor, he’s just… there. And he’s there the next day, too, standing and watching and doing nothing, just drinking it all in. And something about the young man reminds Kevin of… well, of a young him, and he starts talking to him.

What, he asks, is the story? What brings you here this early in the morning?

And Preacher says to him: I’m practicing my only job skills.

What are those?

“I can wait,” he says, with a trace of a smile, “I can think, and I can fast.”

Quoting Herman Hesse to an ex-hippie like Kevin Douglas is pretty much like dangling a steak in front of a lion; Douglas hires him on the spot, forgetting that he has promised his daughter (now the manager of the restaurant) that she will be making the hiring decisions from now on.

When he returns to the restaurant Sarah is just emerging from the recently re-renovated houseboat and heading into the restaurant. She is tall and loose-hipped; her nose is a little large for her face, her hair is dark and elegant. A bit icy; at 25 she knows she would have trouble getting the staff to take her seriously, to take her as anything but a kid playing in her parents’ sandbox. But she has a degree in restaurant management from UNLV and a head for business and she is convinced (correctly, as it turns out) that she can do the job, and do it well.

Her father tells her that he just hired a new busboy, some guy he found wandering down by the docks; she rolls her eyes, she sighs, but this isn’t the first time, and she can always find room for another busser, because the turnover’s so high, and if he’s anything like the other hobos her dad keeps hiring, he won’t last a week.

That night Haywood shows up, clean, shaved, appropriately dressed, polite, articulate… and a hard worker.

Three nights later Kevin is walking across the floor and hears his new busboy recite the very lengthy specials list at a table. He collars Haywood and asks him why he was doing that.

They asked, Preacher says.

And how did you know it? You’ve only been on 20 minutes.

I memorize the specials board each night.

You’re a busboy.

But sometimes it comes up. Like right there.

A week later he is waiting tables.

Sarah doesn’t like him – let’s be clear about that. A little too smooth. Plus, she didn’t hire him. Plus, her father too clearly likes him. But he is a hell of a waiter. And the kitchen staff likes him, too. He shows up early and talks about food with Jimmy Raines. Jimmy wants to hire him as a prep cook. Sarah steps in – he is too good with the tables. Keep him out front.

At first he lives in a rooming house uniformly described as “horrid.” Then he rooms with a couple of other busboys – “an opportunity to brush up on my Spanish,” he says. Then after a misunderstanding involving the sister of one of his roommates, he finds new quarters near the University of Washington campus with a couple of graduate students.

Reluctantly Sarah gives him more responsibilities. She uses him as an expediter. He does some prep work. Discusses menus with her and Kevin and Jimmy.

(Jimmy Raines grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago and learned how to cook from his grandmother, and then from Uncle Sam when he did a stint in the Air Force. When he got discharged he kept on cooking. And he got his job when Kevin and Susan were on vacation in Charleston, dined at the little hotel grill where he worked, and had the best crab cakes on earth. Outside of Maryland. He was a big, ebullient man, and his kitchen was always immaculate.)

Sarah decides Haywood is OK. Dependable and hardworking. Still a little too cocky. Looks her in the eye a little too long. In fact he’s just a little unsettling all around. She calls the restaurant in Annapolis to check his reference. They confirm it, ask about him, tell her how great he is. She’s still not entirely comfortable around him. Maybe he’s not OK. He keeps trying to make her laugh. And, damn it, he keeps succeeding, which is not the way to keep the staff in line.

After he’s worked there a few months he helps her lock up and asks her out on a date. She declines. He asks her again a few weeks later. She declines. A few days later she overhears a bosomy blonde waitress named Claire Elliott waxing rhapsodic about going to see the BoDeans and Treat Her Right with Preacher the night before..

The next night she has him busing tables again.

He doesn’t complain, doesn’t say a word. Works just as he always did. Jimmy complains to Kevin but he, wisely, defers to his daughter in this. At the end of the night Haywood asks her out again.

She says, lips that touched Claire Elliott’s will not touch mine.

Who said anything about lips? he says, with that wry grin that she always echoes and then scowls away, embarrassed.

Seriously, she says. I can’t be with someone if I don’t respect his taste in women; I mean what does that say about me?

Yeah, yeah, I’m a big disappointment, he agrees dismissively. I’m off tomorrow. Take the night off yourself and I’ll take you to see the original King Kong.

Didn’t you hear me? she says.

No lips. I heard you. I promise. No lips.

She glares at him. They are both silent. She searches his eyes intently.

Where – she starts to say, and Preacher interrupts her mid-syllable.

The Egyptian.

OK, I’ll meet you there.

The next evening, after three outfit changes, it occurs to her that she could just ditch him. But she shows up.

They go for drinks afterwards. She likes being the driver. Gives her a feeling of control. Haywood tells her that he’d had a jeep but that he’d given it to his college roommate when he came out to Alaska. She tells him about the year she spent in Lyons for her restaurant apprenticeship. He tells her about his summer there. His French is better than hers. Late in the evening when she returns from the ladies’ room she gives him a long, slow, gentle kiss.

I thought no lips, he says.

Changed my mind, she says.

She decides the unsettled feeling he elicits is a good one.

A month later he’s spending most evenings on the boat.

She complains that she has no sleeping attire that was suitable for having a housemate. Lingerie is too uncomfortable. Sweats too unbecoming. A long t-shirt nightgown was neither comfortable nor attractive. She is the sort of person who will obsess over this.

He shows up at her door with a pair of men’s flannel pyjamas. This is sexy? she says.

You have so little imagination, he tells her. If you alternate between the tops on one night and the bottoms on the other…

(She will learn over the years that, in fact, virtually every man polled agrees that alternating halves of pajamas are far more… inspiring to them than the sexiest of frilly lingerie. And she finds it quite comfortable, after some initial awkwardness about going topless. In fact she will tell someone, years later, that she attributes three of her four children to her choice of sleepwear and its effect on her husband.)

Part Twenty Six

All of this can be documented, except for the wholly fabricated conversations.

"Haywood!” Darby yelled.

A muscular young man straightened from the group of men loading trucks and began walking toward them

“You owe me, Gus,” Darby said to the man next to him.

Gus Avery nodded. “’Preciate it.”

“Well, you married my sister. The least I can do is toss you a spitrat every now and then.”

Haywood reached them.

“Haywood, this is Gus Avery. He captains the Bristol Bay. Gus, Preacher Haywood. The only spitrat worth a damn when there’s work to be done.”

Preacher shook the other man’s hand. Avery was tall, thin, with long hair and a patchy beard. “Mr. Avery.”

“Haywood,” Gus said. “You ever do any fishing?”

“Nope.”

“Ever been on a boat?”

“Yep.”

Avery looked at his brother-in-law. “Well, that’s half the battle. Look, my opening comes up in two days and I’ve lost half my crew. No offense, but I’ve never been desperate enough to hire a spitrat before, and you need to know how important this is. Nowadays we only get two openings during the season. Two 48-hour periods to haul as much fish as humanly possible. My first opening was a bust. That’s part of why I’m desperate. We fish shares, here, which means that you get a percentage of the net. A small percentage, as the juniormost, but if we have a good haul you still can make more in two days than you can make in two weeks at the cannery.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t know that you do. I was a college kid like you when I first came up here. This is pocket money for you. The men you’ll be sailing with – this is an important part of their income for the year. When we hit our spot we’re going to be running long lines and working 48 hours straight through. You let a 200 pound drop in the water, it’s like taking food from their children, understand? We work hard, and fast, and if you get tangled up in a skate we will drag your ass across the ocean rather than stop to haul you back in.”

“I understand. Bust my ass, two days straight.”

Avery looked at his brother-in-law. “He understands.”

Darby shrugged and said nothing.

“OK, like I said, I’m desperate. Come on, I’m going to give you a crash course in how to not drown.”

They walked down to the dock where the Bristol was being provisioned. Avery told him about the change from a few years ago; before, they’d be out a couple weeks at a time, but now -- “balls to the wall. Ten times as dangerous for the fisherman, too. And risky – if we don’t set in the right spot, we come back with the hold empty and that’s it for the year. We barely caught enough last time to cover the expenses.”

On the deck he showed the kid how to set lines, showed him where things were, showed him how to stay out of the way when necessary. “I’ve only been a captain for two seasons,” Avery said. “And everybody knows me as the outsider. And everybody’s waiting for me to fall on my ass. Last year we set records for hauls. But this year… shit. I don’t set where the others do. I have my own ideas about where to find fish. When I’m right, they love me. But when I’m wrong…”

“Shit,” Preacher repeated.

“Exactly.”

When the ship was in position it would set long lines called skates, up to 100 fathoms each. A hundred or so hooks were spaced along it, baited with frozen herring – except that one of Avery’s quirks was that he used fresher fish, which was harder to put on a hook but drew better. The lines were strung between buoys and covered miles. After they set for a few hours, a hydraulic winch on the ship started pulling them back in. A halibut could weight as much as 400 pounds. The work setting the lines was fast and you risked getting your arm caught in a hook or in the line itself and pulled overboard. The work pulling them back in was slower but harder, grappling with the huge, struggling flatfish and pulling them on board to be gaffed and tossed into a refrigerated locker.

Years later Avery would have the following observations about Haywood’s performance on his maiden voyage: first, that he saw through every practical joke the other crewmembers set for him; second, that he always had a smile on his face (they nicknamed him “Twinkle,” in fact,) and third, that he could work them all to death. He was slow setting lines at first but mastered the knack of it very quickly, and once he got it down he was like a machine. And when they started hauling in he threw his back into every fish, and didn’t once slow down or complain for two days straight.

And the haul filled the locker almost to the top. Avery would later reflect that he caught more fish in that 48-hour period than in any two-week span before or since. He caught enough that it made up for the bad catch earlier in the summer. Because his crew was short, the shares were going to be big, too.

They got back to Homer and Preacher staggered down to the Spit and stood in the public shower for a long time, trying in vain to get the smell of fish out. Then dragged himself to his tent and slept for twelve hours straight. Got up and took another shower, which seemed to do a better job. Put on the one pair of jeans and the one shirt that had never been on the boat or in the cannery, and went to the Iceberg Inn to rejoin his crewmates and find out how much they’d earned.

When he got there – the last one to arrive – Avery told him that the rest of the crew had decided to let him take a full share, not the half-share usually given to first-timers. “Hell, Twinkles, you worked it like you’d been doing it all your life,” the mate said. He didn’t add what they all were thinking – you worked it like your livelihood depended on it. Like one of us.

They were thrilled with the take; they drank all night; Haywood ended up sweet-talking the half-Inuit barmaid who had sworn never to go home with a fisherman; everything was going fine until one of the Bristol’s crewmen threw a punch at a crewman from another, less fortunate ship called the Russian Lark, and the bar dissolved into a free-for-all.

Avery swore, later, that Haywood tried to avoid getting involved. He took the barmaid by the hand and started edging for the door. But the Lark’s second mate, a beefy man named Roger, blocked his escape and threw a roundhouse punch that knocked Preacher into a table; Roger took another step toward Haywood with his fist raised and Preacher threw a left-right-left just as the police came through the door. The Lark’s mate dropped like a sack of potatoes right at the feet of the cops.

Preacher got to spend the night in a cell with the rest of the crew; he even made up with the man he’d punched, complaining that his hands hurt far worse than Roger’s head. Avery bailed them out. And he had his doubts; Preacher didn’t seem to favor his hands at all, but Roger’s eye was swollen shut for a week.

The magistrate was used to fishermen getting in drunken brawls, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. He suggested that Haywood just get out of the county.

“What the hell,” Preacher said, “the season’s over anyway.”

He caught a ride to Anchorage and then a ferry south and arrived in Seattle on September 23, 1989.

Years later Haywood wrote: "There was an allure to that life. No stress. Didn't take your work home with you. Just good, honest, back-breaking work. You didn't even notice the smell after awhile. Mostly. But in that jail cell I had a sudden vision of myself 30 years down the road, doing the exact same thing -- busting my ass to keep food on the table, and getting locked up after a beer brawl to celebrate another voyage without drowning, freezing, or both. I decided I had better leave before it became a habit."

Part Twenty Five

This is why we were all – “we” being everyone who cared a bit for Preacher, “we” being a fairly large number of St. John’s students – more than a little annoyed with Preacher that last year:

Spit Rats.

That what they call the college kids who go to Alaska to work in the canneries during the short, frenzied summer fishing season. Spit Rats live in tent cities down by the bay in places like Homer and Valdez. They promised them $20,000 for three months’ work; of course, a loaf of bread costs $5, but still, $20,000. In return you stand up to your knees in fish guts 10 hours a day, six days a week, all summer long.

And this was what Preacher decided to do.

When the rest of us took the MCATs and LSATs and GREs and applied to graduate schools, Preacher decided to go live in a fish camp.

Now, this was St. John’s. If Preacher had spurned g-school for the Peace Corps or to spend a year in Tibet or to backpack across South America following the trail of Che Guevara, nobody would have been too surprised. These are all acceptable post-graduate voyages of self-discovery. An internship at some company’s junior executive program would have been OK; sneered at, but OK. Going to work for your family business would be similarly tolerated.

But to go stand in fish guts?

He was resolute.

Look, I said, at least take the GREs. Then go to Alaska. Take a year off. Once you’ve decided you’re tired of fish, you can apply to graduate school for next year.

He just laughed.

This is going to be your life? This is going to be your career? I said to him.

You sound like your mother, he replied.

Oh, that’s low. Listen, I’m just trying to understand this. Don’t you think this is a waste?

A waste of what, he wanted to know.

A waste of you. Of your mind. Of… of everything. Hell, you could have done this right out of high school. Don’t you think you’re capable of a lot more than this?

Yes, he said. But I don’t have any more specifics than that. You tell me. What do you think I’m supposed to do? Law school? Medical school? Go get an MBA somewhere and make a million dollars? Academia? I’m open to suggestions.

You could do any of those things, I said to him. That’s why this is such a waste. If you didn’t have any particular abilities, then OK, but…

But I have to pick one, he said. I have to pick one and live with it. What if I pick wrong? What if I wake up in 20 years as a, I don’t know, as a lawyer, with a wife and mortgage and everything, and realize with a start that I was supposed to be an English professor? What if I get the MBA and make a million dollars and spend the bulk of my life regretting I wasn’t a writer? I’ve spent my whole life with people – like you – telling me that I can do anything. Everything. But I can’t do everything. I know I have something I’m supposed to do. But I don’t know what it is, and I’m… if I make the wrong choice now I might miss it entirely.

So instead, I said, you’re going to do nothing.

“I can think,” he said. “I can wait. I can fast.”

Herman Hesse? You’re quoting fucking Siddhartha to me?

He shrugged.

I know that all of us had this conversation with him at one point or another our senior year. What made it so irritating was that he himself didn’t particularly want to go to Alaska. He was paralyzed by indecision. Overwhelmed with options.

But I guess it worked out for him. Sort of.

At any rate, he turned in his thesis and rang the bell with the rest of us. Defended it orally, and I’m certain he did a fine job.

Me, during my oral defense I ended up making a series of sarcastic comments belittling one of my panel members, but that’s just me. I took the GREs with all the fervor of someone escaping a job at his father’s plumbing company and got accepted in the American History graduate program at Kent State.

And Preacher prepared for Homer, Alaska, the Halibut Capital Of The World.

Ellen was our valedictorian. No surprise there. My parents were coming down from Philly with my sister to see us graduate. I remember the weather was nice.

So the night before graduation there were a few different graduation parties and I went to one of them with Marc and Drew but got bored early and came home. Preacher had promised to catch up with us later.

When I came back I came in through the kitchen door – that’s what we did – and the house was dark except for the light over the kitchen sink and the tiny lamp that was always on at the bottom of the stairs. But I could hear Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds playing on the downstairs stereo, which told me (a) Preacher was home, and (b) he was entertaining.

Only Preacher would put on Nick Cave. “Kicking Against the Pricks,” played without a trace of irony, I’m sure.

OK, that’s maybe a little harsh. Preacher had a sense of irony. He was just a little ashamed of it.

So I figured I would go into the living room, turn off the stereo, watch a little TV. Maybe once the sex noises died down I could go upstairs and clean my room for the first time in two years – after all, my parents were going to be there the next day.

Maybe not.

But when I sauntered out of the kitchen and into the living room I saw that Preacher and his guest hadn’t quite made it upstairs. They were there on the landing and hadn’t heard me over the stereo and their own heavy breathing. And I didn’t want to look but I wasn’t anticipating them, wasn’t prepared to avert my eyes, and the light at the foot of the stairs made an almost perfect golden pool for them, and I saw. Ellen astride him, her hair long and black and straight and reaching almost to her waist. If her eyes had been open she might have seen me. I couldn’t move. I stood there like a deer in the headlights for what felt like an hour and was probably 30 seconds. Heard the sounds from her. Saw Preacher’s hands on her hips.

Then I stumbled back into the kitchen, mind reeling.

Ellen and I had been over for more than a year. We’d both dated other people. I was fine with all that. There was no reason for me to be upset. She could be with whoever she wanted to be with.

I sat there at the kitchen table wondering if I was furious or just shocked. Now that my ears were tuned to it, I could hear them over and under and through the music. After about 45 minutes of unrelenting cries from my former girlfriend I decided that he had seen me, somehow, even though I was never in his field of view out there, he had seen me, he had known I was coming back early, he had planned this whole thing, and he was just showing off. Just… just taunting me. I'm better looking that you; I'm smarter than you; and I can fuck your girlfriend fifty times better than you ever did. Never screamed like that for you, did she, roomie?

Even as I thought it, I knew it was ridiculous. But still, 45 minutes? Nonstop? I got up and opened the freezer and pulled out the bottle of Stoly that we kept in there. It was mostly full. I poured some into a juice glass. Cold and pure and clear.

The CD ended eventually, and Preacher decided to stop tormenting the poor girl, and the screams died down, and then I heard giggling, and they scampered up the steps. It sounded like he put the Smithereens on upstairs. Green Thoughts. Perfect.

By the time he came downstairs I’d finished about half the bottle. I felt nothing, no effect at all, but I also figured I probably shouldn’t stand up too quickly. He came into the kitchen wearing the same ratty white shorts he’d had on the first day I met him.

Jesus, he said, jumping, I didn’t know anybody was here. What happened to the party?

Got bored, I said. Company?

Yeah, he said, unexpected. Listen, it’s…

Don’t keep her waiting on my account, I said. Let me guess. Out of Seven-Up.

Gave the mini-fridge to a freshman, he said. Most everything’s packed up.

Marc and I were going to be there for another two weeks or so, but he was leaving the day after graduation.

I think there’s still some in there, I told him, nodding toward the refrigerator. When I did so I felt my brain slosh forward in my skull and nearly pull me over.

You OK? he said.

Thrilled, I told him. Go upstairs and finish giving your farewell address to the troops.

He looked at me with concern and fished a couple of bottles out of the refrigerator. Are you sure you’re all right? Do you want to talk…?

Get the fuck upstairs and don’t leave whoever it is waiting any longer, I said.

The thing is, he was serious. He knew something was bothering me and he was perfectly prepared to give up a nice warm bed and a nice warm girl in the bed to help me with… whatever.

I was overcome with disgust for him for that, more than for who was upstairs. And I knew that he wanted to tell me it was Ellen, and at the same time didn’t want to tell me – not because of me, but because of her. He never named names, not without their prior approval. So it was easy for me to keep him from saying it out loud.

He stood in the doorway, half naked, bottles shining in his hands. You sure?

Go, have your last bang as a collegian, I said.

He looked at me a minute longer and then went upstairs. Shortly thereafter I heard more creaking bedsprings and headboard-thumping.

I had some more vodka and then stood and walked into the living room, thinking I would use the TV to drown them out. That journey proved more difficult than I had imagined, but I made it there. I turned on a light and could see a pink bra draped over the arm of the couch and matching pink panties on the floor by the TV. I didn’t have the strength to look around for Preacher’s clothes-pile.

Great, I said out loud, now I have to sit on a sticky couch. I turned the TV on and sat on the sofa and tried not to think about them humping away on it before I got there. I clutched the bottle against my chest and the chill soaked right through me.

The next morning I awoke to the smell of eggs and bacon. The television was still on – Joan Lunden was babbling something about Michael Jackson – and the empty bottle of vodka was on the floor next to me.

I remember thinking, did someone hit me on the head with that bottle? How many times? And why was the TV turned up to 150 decibels? And who the fuck is cooking bacon in my presence?

Then I heard Ellen’s laughter coming from the kitchen. Slowly I sat up, keeping the contents of my stomach in place by sheer force of will.

Light streamed through the front windows.

“OK, you win the bet,” Ellen said (screamed, to me) over her shoulder to where Preacher was making breakfast. “He’s still alive.” She laughed. She was wearing a baseball jersey that said “Conquistadors” and her hair was still unbound.

There were so many sarcastic comments running through my brain that they formed a logjam in my mouth and kept me from uttering a word. I just looked at them and concentrated on not vomiting.

“You want something to eat?” Preacher called out to me.

She came into the living room and gathered up her clothes. "This isn’t weird for you, is it?" she said. "I mean, believe me, this was just a one-time thing."

"No," I said, holding my head in my hands, "it’s the happiest day of my life, you kidding me?"

"Seriously," she said. "I mean it’s not like we both haven’t…"

“I’m fine with it,” I said, as loudly and strongly as I could muster.

Preacher appeared in the doorway with a frying pan in his hands. “Your parents are going to be here in less than an hour,” he said. “Let’s put something in your stomach and get you looking respectable.”

I looked at him and opened my mouth to deliver a withering retort, then clamped it shut again, then raced upstairs to the bathroom.

They ate; Ellen, I assume, found pants; she sauntered back home to prepare for the ceremony with that same loose-limbed stride and cat-plus-canary grin that she’d sported around the house.

Nothing like having your bell rung a few dozen times to relax you before a big speech, I suppose.

Preacher cleaned up the breakfast dishes, came upstairs, tossed me in the shower while I cursed at him, cleaned me up, left me in my room to get dressed, came back downstairs, made coffee, greeted my parents, had Marc start entertaining them, came back upstairs, poured some coffee in me, helped me tie my tie, helped me back down the stairs. I said little, except “leave me the fuck alone” a few times.

We graduated. I made it across the stage without falling. By this time I was more sick than drunk anyhow.

(Don’t read too much into this. I told you, I wouldn’t become an alcoholic for years yet.)

And we stood around at the little outdoor reception later and everyone was chatting and everyone was nice and Ellen came over and met my parents and gave Preacher and me the exact same peck on the cheek and I had a few more drinks at the reception, which helped ease the hangover, and everything was wonderful and perfect and fine and I couldn’t stand it any more. I staggered up to where Preacher was introducing my parents to the Dean, handshakes all around…

“You know what your problem is?” I demanded. It came out a little louder than I had intended, because I was dimly aware of other conversations stopping and people turning to look at me.

Preacher looked surprised. “I just have one?” he said. “Let’s walk over…” he started, and I yanked my arm away from him.

“Your problem is that you are too fucking perfect. You know what happens when you are too fucking perfect? You become too fucking perfectly BORING. Your problem is that you are PERFECTLY BORING. You do everything perfect, you fuck perfect – right, Ellen? -- of that there’s no doubt, you’ll probably cut fish perfectly, too, you piece of shit, and you have even taken boringness to new heights of perfection. You are fucking boring, Mr. Perfect, Mr. Fucking Boring Perfect Ken Doll, and when I open a can of sardines and see a perfectly gutted fish, I’ll know you’re still off somewhere being Mr. Fucking Perfect, you fucking asshole.”

My vocabulary deteriorates when I’m loaded.

There was a deafening silence. Everyone looked at one another. Preacher didn’t. Preacher just looked at me. Without any anger at all, the perfect bastard. He tried to put his hand on my shoulder. “Perfectly true,” he said. “Let’s go for a little walk and talk about it, huh?”

I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at my parents, who were looking at me disdainfully and at Preacher like he was a saint. And I snatched my arm away from him again.

“Get. The Fuck. Away. From Me,” I enunciated, and rolled my hand into a fist and threw a roundhouse punch with everything I could muster.

Preacher didn’t really even have to duck. I misjudged the distance between us, missed, whirled around, fell into a table, and knocked a bunch of ice cubes and crab puffs into the grass. There was a low roar from the crowd and people scrambled out of the way of the flying crudités and I lay on the ground next to the overturned table, too drunk to get back up and too embarrassed to continue breathing.

My father and Marc and Drew helped me up. I heard Preacher say “I’m the last one he wants helping him right now.”

That was the last time I saw Preacher Haywood. And the last time I heard his voice. He sent me a couple of postcards from Alaska. I never responded.

College was officially over.

Part Twenty Four

While I spent the summer in Santa Fe digging up Anasazi ruins (don’t ask), the little bastard waited tables and actually started working on his senior thesis.

Which wasn’t due until January.

“Poetry and the Semiotics of Identity.” I remember the title to his paper as vividly as my own – “History, Pop Culture, and Will Durant.”

Mine was about the mass-marketing of scholarship to lay readers. Preacher had lots of passages from Aristotle and Hank Williams in his.

That’s not important.

This was part of Mark’s story: “One time that summer he gave me a twenty dollar bill – I forget what for, maybe groceries – and there was a telephone number written on it. Apparently this was fairly routine for him – he’d work a table and when he got his tip, some woman would have left her phone number for him. He never called any of them, of course.”

Preacher suffered from Groucho Marx syndrome for awhile, I think – he couldn’t be interested in anyone who would actually want to date someone like him. Maybe it was more than that.

Mark took him clubbing occasionally just to get him out of the house. Gay bars, or at least places where gay men could reasonably be expected.

“He was a good sport about it,” Mark recalled. “In fact, he had the same nonchalance about men and women.”

“You used Preacher as your wingman in gay clubs.”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“Was he any good at it?”

Mark seesawed his hand. “Whatever it was that straight women saw in Preacher,” he said, “gay men mostly did not. He would talk me up, he would intercept the losers, and if there was a group of people there together he would get us into their midst like we were all old friends… but he wasn’t exactly a guy magnet.”

Interesting.

And apparently when they went to places where they might both meet someone, Preacher was supremely disinterested. Mark said it was quite remarkable to watch, actually. He wasn’t standoffish, or rude, or morose; neither did he flirt, pursue, or invite. He just… was. And at the end of the night he always went home alone. And never returned phone calls.

“To my knowledge,” Mark said, “he had no intimate contact of any kind with anyone that summer. Not even himself, for all I know.”

Our senior year Ellen was back for poker nights. She was the same old Ellen – smart, cute, driven. Actually rather wearying.

And Preacher’s intentionally dateless streak continued. Oh, he would talk to girls at parties and he couldn’t help but flirt a little around campus but he was just not interested. Which, apparently, made him all the more desirable.

He came home with me at Christmas. He had ridden me like a $10 mule after Thanksgiving to get my senior paper finished. So we were the only two seniors not busting our asses to get it done over the Christmas break. I wanted to wring his neck at the time, but of course he was right.

Bastard.

I didn’t have any real girlfriends, per se, that year. But the few times a girl tiptoed out of the house early in the morning with her underpants in her pocket… it was my room she was leaving, not Preacher’s.

Until the croquet match against Navy that Spring. Preacher still ran and rowed and did all that sweaty stuff, and yet the only competitive sport at the school – croquet – required roughly the same amount of athletic conditioning as tying one’s shoes. Without the bending down part. Still, he played, and with that muscle memory thing he had going, he really cleaned up. This was a man who knew as much Sun Tzu and Clausewitz and Musashi as any of these Navy guys. I don’t know if that helps you prepare croquet strategy. Doesn’t hurt, I suppose.

So our senior year they were gunning for him; he’d kicked their asses twice (he didn’t play his freshman year). But – as usual – the drunks from St. John’s (costumed that year as pirates, if memory serves) carried the day, and Haywood led the way.

Which brings me to Captain Debbie Feder. I actually met her at the L&N Seafood Grill at the Pentagon City Mall. She was in uniform. Captain Feder had something to do with logistics for the Navy; an abbreviated CV is in the archive. She’s married with three kids. But the first time I met her, her name was Debbie Kupek, and she wasn’t married, she was a senior company commander at the US Naval Academy.

It was after the party had broken up; Preacher was nowhere to be found, but some of the rest of us went to an after-party party that took up two floors of one of the dormitories and I kept expecting him to show up there, but he never did. It made me a little angry, at the time. Him sitting there at our house alone. I thought that the whole broken-hearted thing had gone on long enough.

And thus my first introduction to Debbie Kupek – I got home, the house was dark, and just as I was tiptoeing up the stairs to my room, the two of them came tiptoeing back down towards the kitchen.

She was wearing his pirate shirt and that familiar dazed smile. Short strawberry blonde hair and freckles.

“Good timing,” Preacher said to me. Kupek had the decency to look sheepish.

“Because I missed the whole wounded-goat phase?” I said. I was thinking: I hope they’re finished, because I need to get some sleep.

Kupek turned beet red.

“No, because I need your help,” he said.

We sat in the kitchen and drank Seven-Up and Preacher concocted an elaborate plan for sneaking her back into the Academy when her pass had, technically, expired at midnight. It involves a security flaw which I suppose has been patched since then – we stole a crew hull from the St. John’s boathouse and the two of them slipped silently across College Creek. My job was to serve as lookout at the boathouse so he wasn’t caught returning the shell.

So that was the first question I asked her, after the pleasantries were out of the way: did you get caught that night?

“Not officially,” she said. “My conduct officer knew. I mean I showed up three hours late, soaking wet. And I think my cheeks were still… you know, flushed. Because she took one look at me and guessed everything.”

Best friends will do that.

“No,” she said to a later question, “I am not a Worshipper. I’m a Presbyterian. But I read his book. My husband doesn’t… this is all kept sealed for 50 years, right?”

“At least,” I promised for the umpteenth time.

“Nobody knows about us. I mean Sarah – my roommate, the conduct officer – she knew, but she’s dead. I mean it was just one night, a million years ago, but… still.”

I understand, I told her.

Sarah died of breast cancer. Satisfied? Try to stay focused on the relevant stuff.

I told her that Preacher had been, quite deliberately, celibate that entire year, that she was the first girl after his heart had been broken the previous June. And she said:

“Well, to be honest, it was his butt first, and it was another woman who pointed it out to me. That got me looking at him. Then it was the way he walked – with that sort of unconscious grace. That had me looking at him closer. And, of course, no Navy haircut – that was a plus, too. So after the match I talked to him. And he was smart, and funny, and nice, which had me talking to him more… and at one point I said something to him that was supposed to sound coy and sexy but it came out a little forced and he looked at me with this little half-smile and I made the mistake of looking deep into his eyes. It was like… how can I put this? When you looked there they went a mile down. And for the first half-mile he was a pussycat. Then for the next quarter-mile you saw a glimpse of mountain lion. Wild and a little scary. And if you could look down long enough, that last quarter-mile there was something so lonesome and sad and… and maybe I’m remembering more than there actually was. But either way, once we shared that look, that was all she wrote. I mean it wasn’t like me to just pick up some guy like that. And to be honest I kind of made fun of you Johnnies back then. Bunch of long-haired… well, you know. Although someone told me later that Preacher was an all-around athlete… anyhow. After the Navy spent three and a half years making me tough as nails, I looked into those eyes and I was torn between the desire to put my arms around him and the desire to wrap my legs around him, if you know what I mean. But… but I fought it off for awhile. We talked about music. And he was shocked that I had never heard of the Plimsouls. So that was the excuse. I went back to his place to listen to the Plimsouls. Although we both knew that wasn’t why I was going back to his place.

“But when you tell me I was the first one in a year… you know, I thought something was funny. About the way he acted. Especially afterward. But he… You know what I mean. You made that crack about the wounded goat. I wanted to punch you. Plus I was past my curfew. I didn’t have much time to spend trying to figure it out.”

At the time, I hadn’t thought for a heartbeat about the fact that the Navy mascot was a goat, but it finally hit me there in the restaurant. Sometimes it takes me 16 years to catch up. I told her that the wounded goat thing hadn’t been a Navy crack. It was something we said about all the women he brought up there.

She gave me an icy, withering glare. “Funny how that doesn’t make it any nicer.”

I said nothing, ducking – cringing, you might say – behind my objectivity.

“But the thing was,” she said, “I had this distinct feeling that I had… that he had left the room, in some way. Once we sort of got… once we started… it was like someone turned something off in his eyes. I mean… there was a reason I never called him again afterwards. He called me – he was a gentleman – but I brushed him off. I wanted something more than just sex. And I was definitely not a one-night-stand kind of girl; I never would have gone with him if I hadn’t thought he was special. I mean I had every intention of making it the first night of many. But all that went out the window sometime that night. I’m not sure when.”

I bit my tongue. I swallowed hard. I listened to her prattle on about her career. I was going to be objective, damn it! I wasn’t going to taint the interview!

I couldn’t help it.

“You didn’t tell him to stop.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“That night. He’s a nice guy, he’s got dreamy eyes, whatever. Then you start getting down to it and you decide all that has gone away. That something about having sex has shut him down in a way you don’t like.”

“Something like that,” she said.

“But you didn’t tell him to stop. You didn’t try to go back a few steps and see if you could bring that back.”

“We weren’t really in a position to stop, just then,” she said.

“I know my roommate,” I said, “and I know that whatever you did took hours, and happened more than once.” I watched myself talking. In horror. I took myself by the shoulders and shook myself, hard. I demanded to know what the hell I was doing, defending someone who didn’t need defending and screwing up an interview at the same time. I threatened to slap myself. But I didn’t shut myself up. “I mean, let’s be real, Captain. This is supposed to be historically accurate. You started out the night hoping for a relationship AND orgasms. But once you had a little taste of the latter, you decided they were worth forgoing the former. Rather than stopping to figure out what was wrong with him.”

She pursed her lips. Stared at me for a moment. Got up and left.

Why is it that my every impulse is counterproductive?

Part Twenty Three

Ordinarily the fall semester ended a few days before Christmas and the spring semester began in late January. That year DJ had his own place and Jen was spending all of her time with her boyfriend and I was bored as hell. So shortly after New Year’s I went back down to Annapolis and begged Ilona to come back early, too. She relented toward the end of the break and we had a few very nice days to ourselves in that old house. Then we had a few so-so days. Then we had a couple of days when we were ready to kill one another, and it was with some relief that we greeted Preacher and Moira, returning to Annapolis a couple of days before classes resumed.

I was sitting in the living room in sweats watching cartoons and eating cereal and Ilona was in the dining room trying to get some reading done and wishing she had some other place to stay when they came in laughing and shaking a few snow flurries off. I hadn’t even noticed it was snowing. Moira was wearing jeans – the first time I ever saw her in pants – and a cowboy hat. Preacher’s coat still had a lift pass on the zipper. Cold air billowed through the door around them and rifled to the back of the house, fluttering papers and stirring Ilona and I out of our cranky stupors.

This is a cozy domestic scene, Moira said, looking at us. Ilona managed a smile. I was about to say the same thing, she said. Where have you two been all month?

Hither and yon, Moira said. Preacher took off his jacket. I didn’t expect to see you guys here, he said.

New Jersey in January, I said, and I shrugged. What more could I add?

Tell me about your trip, Ilona said, thirsty for someone else to talk to.

Moira took off her coat while Preacher took a suitcase upstairs. She told us about Nashville and Memphis and New Orleans and Galveston and Austin and Albuquerque and, finally, Telluride, where he learned to ski for the first time.

I rolled my eyes as I suffered a mental image of Preacher Haywood staggering about for thirty seconds, and then qualifying for the Olympics by the end of the day. Because that’s just the way he was. And I suspected Moira was the same way. If you took away Preacher’s self-deprecating air and replaced it with ball-busting, and made him way better looking, you had Moira.

They talked about the music they’d heard and Moira expressed her disappointment at real live cowboys and Indians both; give me, she said, a nice superficial Hopalong Cassidy movie any day. Preacher made a fire in the fireplace and brewed some tea (I had instant coffee) and I forgot to be annoyed with Ilona, I was so busy being annoyed with them. The worst time to encounter two people in love is not when you are lonely, but when you have just realized how irritating your significant other actually is.

Ilona wasn’t nearly so analytical. She was just grateful to have someone else she could talk to.

Later in the afternoon they left for Moira’s place. Don’t wait up, Preacher said to me as he left, which was supposed to be a reassuring way of telling me that Ilona and I would still have the place to ourselves for the night. Instead it made me want to hit him.

When the semester started up again Ilona and I gratefully parted company. It was too soon, she said to me. We needed a few more months of living apart.

Live and learn, I said.

Preacher and Moira seemed to have found a new equilibrium, too. Preacher wasn’t over there as much. And when he did go, they sometimes would leave the house and engage in meaningful social interaction with the rest of the world. While the entire student body knew they were sleeping together by the second day of classes, the only way the administration found out about it was because different faculty members began to report seeing them together in restaurants and at the movies.

I didn’t know, at the time, about Moira’s sexual tutelage of my housemate. But I now know that it continued that semester, despite the fact that they had finally admitted to something other than a teacher-student relationship. Maybe that means Moira was serious about all the “training your natural gifts” crap she was spreading back at the beginning. But not necessarily. I never underestimate anyone’s capacity for self-delusion. Including my own.

We started up the poker nights again. It wasn’t the same without Ellen, but we still had a good time. Preacher was a slightly cagier poker player, I must say. If learning every possible human sexual position makes you a better poker player… then life is just too fucking unfair for words.

Moira insisted – INSISTED – that Preacher do something without her during Spring Break. She told me, when I interviewed her, that she didn’t want Preacher to completely miss out on the “ordinary debauchery” of a student’s life that year.

“As opposed to the extraordinary debauchery he was experiencing under your mentoring?”

“Precisely,” she said. “I had read a review of Lolita. I remember it distinctly. It said the book was about the Old World debauching the New, until suddenly you realized it was the other way around. And I thought, my god, that’s us.”

“Lolita.”

“Not Lolita per se, but… all of the sudden it hit me that not only was I not in charge of the relationship, but Preacher had so deftly taken control of the situation that he was able to still let me believe I was in charge even when he was the one running things.”

I said nothing. He could do that, I knew.

“So I wanted him to go out and be a normal college kid, so I could have a couple weeks to become a normal college teacher, and we could go back to where we started out. With me in charge.”

“Did it work?”

“Of course not. I missed him terribly. When he came back I told him that I loved him.” She laughed at the memory of it, pushed her hair back, laughed again. “What a sorry, sorry debaucher I was. I mean up until he left I told myself it was just… it was just sex. Oh, sometime during that Christmas holiday together I admitted to myself that I liked him, that there was something there outside of the sexual relationship, but when he left…” She shook her head. “It wasn’t even the whole two weeks. I called your place after a week to see if you or the other one – Mark, was it? – knew where he was or how I could get in touch with him. I kept having these mental images of him cavorting with these bikini-clad co-eds.”

I knew that in her worst nightmare, she still imagined herself better looking than any of these phantom rivals.

“And instead he answered the phone,” she said. “On the first ring. He said he was getting ready to pick up the phone and call me. He was probably lying. But anyhow, he came over, and that was when I told him. Before I told him I forbade him to say it back to me.”

“So what did he say?”

“He said, I was wondering how long it would take you to admit that you feel the same way. Cocky bastard.”

“And that was the end of the sex training?”

“Yes,” she said. “Actually… I sort of left some details out. Details that you will find when you go through those notebooks, so I might as well tell you now. Shortly after I was called on the carpet at the dean’s office – this was before I told him to go away for Spring break – we had gone into another… phase of his training. We got a hotel in Baltimore for a weekend. I had made some discrete inquiries. We went to a certain pub near the hotel and invited a gentleman back with us. Preacher did… as he’d been trained, I suppose. He wasn’t enthusiastic about it, but exploring your homosexual side and dealing with multiple partners were both a part of the program. And once I tried women I had become a firm believer in bisexuality and I suppose I figured Preacher would react the same way.” She looked up, rather wistfully, if someone like Moira is capable of a wistful look. “But he just… he just detached himself. Which was part of what he was supposed to be learning anyhow – transcending desire. I thought he had done it before, but he did it even more that night. But performed admirably. We did all the things I set out to do.”

I was getting my head around Preacher having sex with another man. A three-way with Moira – that I found very easy to believe. But Moira watching while he put on… an exhibition, essentially, with some guy they found in a swingers’ bar?

“Anyhow,” she continued, mistaking my shock for a studied silence, “a couple of weeks later we went back, and to the same bar, and this time I picked out this darling dark-haired girl. I figured this would help him understand better. And the same thing happened. He just… removed himself, even farther than usual. Technically, he was flawless. That girl should have just entered a convent the next day, because the rest of her sexual life was going to be disappointing by comparison.” She laughed. If Preacher had told the story, it would have been a self-effacing laugh. That was one of the principle differences between Moira and Preacher.

“So you stopped?”

“So he’d graduated,” she said. “I mean, we weren’t studying tantra. Not in any meaningful way. I guess that’s important to clarify, what with Preacher’s future occupation as a guru. Real tantra Buddhism takes a lifetime, and the sex part is just a small part. He was no tantric yogi. But he’d learned what I set out to teach him. The technical skills plus the… distance. When I first met him I told him he liked the person better than the act. But those two weekends – he didn’t give a damn about either one, he wasn’t particularly attracted to either one, and I think in both cases he didn’t like seeing me with them. But he did what his training taught him to do. And did it superbly, I must say. It was the act, not the person. That was, in the end, the goal.”

I didn’t tell her what Preacher thought about all that. I didn’t tell his line about the importance of unlearning what she’d taught him. I didn’t even tell her about my one long talk with him about her, shortly after she left.

“And after that?”

“After that – we only had a couple of months after that, and I unabashedly gave him my heart,” she said. “And vice-versa. He told me he would transfer to Oxford, can you believe that? I told him I would look for a job in the States. We were both horrible liars. And the year ended, and I got on the plane. And just like before, after a week I couldn’t stand it and I called the house. Left a message. He never called back. Which… he was right. It was best to just not try to communicate at all; a broken heart heals faster that way. It’s not that he didn’t call me back that bothers me now. It’s that he was, in the end, stronger than me.”

Which brings me to my one and only prolonged conversation with Preacher Haywood on the subject of Moira Callahan. It was right after she left.

The setting was McDermott’s; Preacher had been moping for two days and Mark and I decided to take him to our favorite local watering hole to drown his sorrows. We sat at a table and ordered beer and Mark and I both tried to be sympathetic.

“Let me tell you,” I said, “what worked for me.” My only real experience as the dumpee was when Ellen and I split up, and I recovered pretty quickly, but I had milked the experience for all it was worth at the time. “First, you need at least two weeks in the same sweatpants. Second, you can’t eat anything other than Fruity Pebbles and Pop-Tarts for a month. Third, you have to play the Cure’s Disintegration album at least 250 times.”

“You can just play Fascination Street over and over again,” Mark suggested.

“What flavor Pop-tarts?” Preacher said, and gulped down his beer.

“Brown sugar and cinnamon,” I said.

“Chocolate frosted,” Mark said.

“I thought only women used chocolate after being dumped,” I said.

“Maybe it's a gay thing,” Mark replied, shrugging and downing his beer, too.

“And you should start smoking,” I said, lighting a cigarette. Preacher took it out of my hand and took a big drag. Then he started hacking.

“Can’t miss someone if you’re coughing your lungs out?” he gasped.

“Something like that,” I said, taking it back and puffing away happily.

About eight rounds later the bartender wouldn’t serve us anymore, so we bought a big bottle of Jim Beam and staggered for home. Yes, we sang “Fascination Street” along the way – what of it?

We got home and Preacher found three highball glasses because I had returned a little of the beer to the Annapolis soil on the way home and he wasn’t about to let me drink from the bottle. We sat down at the table and he put The River – both disks – in the CD player and Mark poured the first round.

We sat there in silence for a moment. “To Bruce Springsteen,” Mark said, and we all raised our glasses. “To Bob Dylan,” I added. “To Woodie Guthrie,” Preacher noted.

I refilled the glasses. “Who comes before Woodie Guthrie?” Mark said.

“Jimmie Rodgers,” Preacher and I said simultaneously. Son of a bitch, I thought. Now he’s ruined me, musically.

“To Jimmie Rodgers,” Mark said.

“To Ginger Rogers,” I said.

“To Ginger Baker,” Preacher said. He refilled the glasses.

I don’t remember what came after that. I do remember that later Mark was sitting in the chair with a glazed look in his eyes, his drink sitting untouched before him.

Serves you right, you know, I said to Haywood.

What?

Serves you right, I repeated. It might not have sounded that clear.

How you figure? Preacher said.

The bottle of JB was mostly empty.

You were… that guy.

What guy?

That guy. You know. That… guy.

He refilled our glasses. I doubted that would help me be MORE articulate. I considered my options, shrugged, and picked up the glass.

What guy? Preacher said. In those days he could hold his liquor better than me. At least he could maintain better. Now, of course, the remnants of my liver would make a mockery of his. But even Preacher had reached the point where he couldn’t feel his lips anymore.

The guy with… the wings. Brueghel guy.

Icaraus.

Yeah, him. You were him. Flew too fuckin’ close to the sun, man.

No, Preacher said. Not Icarus. Phaeton.

Mark arced his hand through the air and made a whistling sound that ended with a crash.

Right, Preacher nodded at him.

What’s the difference? I said, a little angry. They both didn’t listen to their fathers. They both crashed and burned.

Technically, Mark said, they burned and crashed.

Preacher laughed and took a big swallow. Icarus was just careless. Phaeton was trying for… arête, he said.

That’s what you were doing? Striving for excellence?

Yep.

I took a swallow and mulled on it. Mark tried to raise his glass.

Reach for the one in the middle, man, I told him. We watched him carefully raise the glass. Arête, he said in toast, and we repeated it and all drank again.

I don’t see it, I said after a pause. Then I raised my glass. Parrhesia, I said. We managed another swallow.

Another long pause. I was supposed to be… getting skills, Preacher said. Agape, he toasted, and we all drank again. The woman knew everything there was to know about sex. I mean we did some… some kinky shit, he said. I mean… you know how long I can go without coming?

Whoa, Mark said, trying to decipher that combination of verbs.

Me neither, Preacher said. Not anymore. As long… as long as it takes. I make the little map, and I find the little buttons, and just… wind me up and press play.

What the fuck are you talking about, I said to him, laughing.

It’s like… he said, and stopped. I learned how to fuck. I learned how to fuck so good that I don’t really actually even want to fuck anymore.

Wore you out? I said. Come on.

No, not that, he said. He looked over at Mark, who by this time was resting his head on the table. I just… there’s no more mystery. No more uncertainty. No more fun. Just… technique. I mean. Don’t get me wrong. It was… some of it was… wow. But the thing is that knowing how to do all those things made it like…

I understood. Mostly because I was as drunk as he was.

And the thing that bothers me the most is that I love her, man, he said to me. That absolutely wasn’t supposed to happen. And she… I mean, sex was supposed to be this, this thing, over here – and he gestured with his hand – this separate thing, like playing the violin or making eggplant parmesan, and… And I got that. I really got that. I didn’t fall in love with her because of all the sex. I fell in love with her despite the sex. I fell in love with her for the times when we were clothed and upright and… but you can’t love a woman that… that’s so… what’s the word? For her?

Hot, I said.

Right. Hot. You can’t love a woman that hot and not want to have sex with her. But when we had sex it was… it pushed us apart. It was… It was fucked up. That’s what it was. Except at the end when we both could admit what we felt. What had happened. Then we had, we only had, we only had two goddamn months to try to fix it. Two months to learn a whole new way to do it, a way where you loved the person more than the act. Two months to enjoy it… in our… hearts.

I looked at him closely. If he started to weep, I would have hit him in the face with the bottle. But he didn’t. Just sat there staring at his now-empty glass.

We finally put down those stupid sex journals and put aside everything else and just… just tried to touch each other. And I finally… she finally closed her eyes. We both did. We both finally just let go and looked for something else, something… that wasn’t just nerve endings. And… it was much harder, and we had to stop because she had to go back to Ireland, even though she could have stayed another two weeks, she left right on schedule like she said she would before we had enough time to make it right.

Let me get this straight, I said, splitting the last two fingers from the bottle with him. You’re pissed off because all you had was an entire school year of mind-blowing sex with the hottest woman you’ve ever seen? Is that really what’s bothering you?

He finished his drink. That’s what’s bothering me, he said. She could have ruined either sex or love, but instead I think she’s ruined both for me.

Now, finally, you’re drunk enough to sound just like everybody else who’s ever been dumped, I said. I’m going to go throw up and then we can put the Cure back on.

When I woke up in the bathroom the house was quiet. I stumbled into my room and slept until noon and then the three of us sat very, very quietly in the living room, trying to figure out which variation of the fetal position was most effective. Late in the afternoon Haywood made an emergency phone call and a townie he knew named Greg showed up at our door with a bag full of Burger King hamburgers. The grease treatment was timed just right, and we slowly rejoined the living, and Preacher never mentioned her to me again.