Tours of the Black Clock

6

THE NIGHT THAT MARC saw the stranger lying dead at his mother’s feet, he was nineteen. He turned and walked down the hotel stairs, out into mainstreet, down to the dock in time to catch the last boat to the mainland. He’d thought about doing this many times but this was the first that his nerve caught up with his imagination. Over the years he’d watched old man Zeno with his red riverbitten face and his long blue coat with the dingy gold buttons sail his small human ferry back and forth each day, bringing over the years thousands of strangers to the black and amber lights of Greek Judy’s tavern. Now in the dark Zeno didn’t give a second look to the boy as he stepped onto the boat, crowding in with the others, huddling against them in the fog and reek of Judy’s bourbon. But at some point during the twenty-minute journey, the old man looked Marc’s way and said something to the effect of, “Boy, that hair’s some kind of white.”

They got to shore and the tourists piled out of the boat and onto the buses that were waiting to take them twenty miles northwest to the city of Samson. It’s possible Marc wouldn’t have gotten on the bus even if he’d had a ticket, nerve having lost ground to imagination once again. Nothing irrevocable had yet been crossed. But there was no boat back to Davenhall until the morning, and so he stood there in the dirt watching the lights of the last bus vanish down the highway and then looking over his shoulder at the river behind him, and Zeno’s boathouse in the remaining desolation. Zeno sized things up. He stood in the doorway of the boathouse where he lit the gaslamp next to the window, and after blowing out the match and tossing it on the step he called out to the boy’s white hair, “Just what is it you imagine you’re doing?” I imagine, the boy answered, that I’ve lived on that island long enough, and am now about to put some real distance between us. “Not tonight, I’d say,” the old man answered. After a moment he added, “Come on in and drink something stiff, and I’ll take you back first boat of the morning.”

I’ll come in and have the drink, Marc answered. But I’m not going back.

They played cards in the boathouse, in the light of the lamp. The old man bet the gold buttons of his blue coat, since he plainly cheated and there was never the slightest danger of his losing them. He fell asleep against the wall while the boy made various accusations.

Marc did not go on to Samson the next day. Rather he did return to the island with the old man, much as the old man had figured, though he refused to step foot on it. Back and forth three times he sailed with the old man and more busloads of tourists, refusing to enter the town and waiting on deck as Zeno went to get some of Judy’s beer. Once Marc glimpsed in the distance his mother walking up main-street in a tattered salmon-colored dress he recognized, her arms folded in that way of hers and her face set with a familiar and incomprehensible determination. He glimpsed her long hair in the rising dust of the town, the gray hair that once had been a tarnished panic of fool’s-gold yellow. Marc lay low on the deck of the boat facing out toward the river, away from town and the island, leaning over the side and dragging his hand in the water, lunging for fish that he had no intention of catching.