No, I'm not all right, she tried to say, but couldn't. Her throat seized up in a parody of what her car's engine had done at the end of this, its final day. She could not answer the solicitous question; could not lift the drink that had cost all the money she had left in the world, to ease her throat; could not even see who the questioner was. His low tenor faded into the stream of rain against the windows and the unintelligible susurrus of the bar TV. She looked at the hanging lobster traps, the flemished rope at the base of the motionless fan, the spar suspended from the ceiling like a mismatched rafter, the old whitewashed anchor and oars, the life preserver and wheel of fortune hanging on the brick wall in poetic mockery.
     She was back on Milwaukee Avenue in northwest Chicago two thousand miles away, staring numbly at the frame house where she'd grown up, the house the bank now owned. Its stained siding. The cracks in the plaster of her bedroom. She was back unlocking the car in the driveway and throwing in her knapsack, getting in, fleeing the rockfall of debt and condolences.
     She was guiding her brown Rabbit past the church, the garage where she no longer worked, the MOWIMY POLSKU signs in the windows of shops she'd known since childhood. Better to leave the past and become the car, the thrumming steel, aluminum, and rubber vessel that felt nothing and regretted nothing.
     Then she was in a service station in Ohio, replacing a hose she should have duct-taped. Her credit card was no good, so she handed over precious cash, her dwindling store from the coffee can they'd kept bills in with the paranoia of the old country. All she'd salvaged from what the bank had taken.
     Then at a dead-of-night truck stop in Pennsylvania, pointing a flashlight at a cylinder she knew was pulling water because of the dropping coolant level, the godawful bucking. Hoping she could baby it the rest of the way. Repulsed by the Airwick-reeking, crud-encrusted toilet she needed to use, afraid of the men her flashlight beam might attract.
     Then on the shoulder of I-80 in the forsaken middle of the Alleghenies, buffeted by the airstream of passing semis, her eyes swollen from tears and lack of sleep. Pouring water from a plastic apple-juice container into the engine she should have rebuilt fifty thousand miles before.
     Then straining on three cylinders up through New England, into Maine, laughing at the big 65 on the speed-limit signs, wondering why the sunshine looked black. And still the head gasket leaked, and still she willed the car on, throwing all the weight of her grief behind it.
     Then coasting down to her destination, to the one place she could remember being happy, this random, insane sanctuary on a drowned coast. She was running on fumes, searching for someone to hire a busgirl, cook, grease monkey, dishwasher--a stocky curly-haired blonde with nothing to offer but the hand-me-down values and skills of the working-class couple who once, long ago, scrimped and saved to take their boat- enamored daughter on a magical windjammer holiday in Maine, in Camden--here.
     Had she been driving, or driven? Since childhood, for no earthly reason, she'd been entranced by seafaring tales. The inland ocean that was Lake Michigan was no substitute for the sea that called her. Never any good at homework anyway, she'd sit and watch endless repeats of The Spanish Main on afternoon television. She'd been the only one more interested in the Bounty than in Mel Gibson. And though schoolwork was a torment, she devoured Horatio Hornblower novels, scoured secondhand shops for nautical books, learned the terms for old-fashioned sails and lines she never dreamed her hands would touch. When they scrimped and saved to take her on a Maine schooner, her parents had fulfilled her heart's desire, and the joy of that week had buoyed her through all the darkness that followed. It should have been enough, that gift. Yet when their deaths cut her moorings to the urban and the concrete, she returned here, to Maine, to the sea. To the old ships. As if some current had been trying all that time to bear her here, and it was only the anchor of family, obligation, love, guilt that held her back. As if here was where she was always meant to be.
     As if she wasn't running from, but to...
     And then the Rabbit died and she was standing next to its brown bulk in the Town Landing lot, its wake of oil like a smear of roadkill, the reek of the seized engine burning her sinuses. She had loved this car--dubbed it the Turdmobile when there was humor and cuteness in the world. She had slept in it the night before, shivering, yet clinging to the hope of a job. When she kicked the chassis, the toe of her workshoe caught in a rust spot, and she was thrown off balance and fell sobbing on the hood in the first spatters of rain.
     Now she was inside, in the first bar she could find, her face so set and haggard that the affable bartender hadn't thought to card her.
     It was not inside enough. No man-made interior could be shield against this storm. She would have to burrow into herself to find a place, in the deepest part of the heart, where no hurt could reach.
     The drink in her hand was a Dark and Stormy, ordered from a selection of Cappy's Coolers, Space Aliens, Bloody Bloodys. She would have liked to down them all. She wanted to see if you could drown yourself from within. But she didn't have the money to get drunk. In its Mason jar, the Dark and Stormy was all melted ice, dilute. Perhaps she had stirred it too much.
     "No luck then?" the bartender asked when she didn't answer the other voice. He pushed a basket of popcorn toward her. Famished, she ate a handful. It tasted like Styrofoam and bile.
     "No," she choked out. "End of the season. Nobody's hiring. Maybe at Christmas, they said."
     She wouldn't live that long. If the misfortune was great enough, if the response was dazed and lame enough--if you waited too long to run, if you kept trusting that somehow things would work out--you reached the end of the line, simply, literally.
     Camden was a harbor town, once a center of shipbuilding and sawmills, lime kilns and woollen companies, fed by the Megunticook River, which emptied as a sparkling waterfall into the marina. A town of white church spires and bay windows and brick storefronts with happy names like the Smiling Cow, gentle bookstores where you could sit and have a cup of tea while you browsed. A town hugging the yacht harbor that was its tourism's lifeblood, protected in turn by avuncular Mount Battie, soft pine-furred Mount Megunticook. In the harbor, the schooners that had once fished the Grand Banks, carried ice and lumber up and down the eastern seaboard.
     It was too picturesque a spot in which to hit bottom. Tomorrow she would stand at dockside and watch the graceful ships leave on their weeklong journeys. The pretty Mary Day and Grace Bailey, the rose-sailed Roseway, the historic Lewis R. French, the ketch Angelique with her sails the color of dried blood.
     She had hoped to be a galley hand. She had visited every ship, talked to every available captain, checked with every office. Camden was home to a lot of schooners. So were nearby Rockport and Rockland. One of them might have been short a hand. Some messmate might have gone back to college early, gotten sick, walked out in a huff. But the competition for those jobs was fierce, and people applied way in advance. People with lots of sailing experience. Students from the Maine Maritime Academy. So she offered to be a cook or a deck swabber or an office assistant. And when they had no need for those either, she tried in town. Just an odd job to hold her, for a week or a day. If she couldn't work on cars, she'd pump gas or bus tables.
     But there was nothing.
     The bartender went to pull a draft beer: Shipyard Ale, what the man behind her had ordered. The tap spat foam.
     The man's shadow crossed her, lengthened, then stubbed down as he sat. The chair legs scraped the floor as he pulled himself close enough to rest his elbows on the bar. Thick, callused hands, salted in brine and sanded by hemp, folded into each other over the sprawling vista of the Camden Hills that was burned into the wood under the bar's lacquer.
     You all right there? he had asked.
     "No," she answered at last, and looked over at his grizzled face. Tanned leathery by sun and wind, graven with deep lines, sprouting a fuzz of silver beard, it looked exactly like the faces of the old salts, of old Cappy himself, in the silver-nitrate photos on the walls. Broken veins etched the bulbous nose. The eyes, under a drooping forelock of hair more salt than pepper, were sunken in hollows.
     Two lost souls, she thought. She was getting woozy; fatigue, hunger, the drink that tasted weak but had been strong.
     Nodding at her answer, he patted his pockets, found and withdrew a well-chewed pipe and a pouch of Captain Black, began pinching small dead leaves into the bowl.
     "Sailors should smoke pipes," she said as he struck a wooden match.
     "What makes you think I'm a sailor?" His pale blue eyes met hers over the bowl as he held the match to it and drew.
     "Your hands," she said.
     His closemouthed smile radiated fissures into sun-damaged flesh. "I was a sailor, once," he said. "Now I just remember."
     This poor, wretched man, old before his time, battered by the ruthless sea, the ruthless world... She swallowed tears, washing them down with the final inch of rum and ginger beer and icemelt.
     "Bit of a blow, eh, Henry?" said the barman, struggling to tap a keg.
     "Sou'wester," the old seaman replied, in dismissal. As though the storm's direction invalidated the rising winds and dark, whipping branches and drumming rain outside.
     Outside, where Melanie Gierek knew she should be, crawling into the corpse of her Volkswagen. She would huddle in frozen misery until hypothermia lulled her into a forever sleep, or the cops rousted her into a warm jail cell for vagrancy, or the weather let up enough for her to thumb a ride to the nearest military recruiting center or convent.
     The world was spinning out of control.
     She didn't know what she said; something about it being nearly midnight, nearly closing, and something else about the money, the tip--or she tried to, anyway, but only garbled repentance came out. Then she was pushing off from the brass footrail, slipping on the wet doorway tile, fleeing the illusion of comfort and safety. She shouldered through the door and into a lash of rain, her leather jacket left behind on the barstool--
     She turned around under the awning, taking the brunt of the torrent on her back--"Screw it! Screw the goddamn jacket!"--and kicked the red door hard. Then she whirled into the wind, stumbled with the force of it, kept her feet somehow with the suppleness of mild inebriation. Rain drove tears from her face. She skated and slid around the sharp corner and down the slope to the public landing.
     Ahead, visible only in lightning flashes, were the dark harbormaster's shack and, beyond it, the tall swaying masts of schooners, the blind windscreens of bobbing fiberglass motorboats, a tangle of smaller masts. The '76 VW was in the middle of the lot, almost invisible behind curtains of rain. Water washed the reflection of floodlights. She fumbled the key into the lock, muscled the door open, climbed in.
     Her breath fogged the windows; soon she couldn't see the sheeting water encasing the vehicle. Her wet jeans and sweatshirt stuck to the vinyl seat. Her shoes were heavy against the floor mat. The short hair plastered to her forehead dripped into her eyes.
     She slammed an open palm against the steering wheel. Once. Then again, harder. She pounded the wheel, the dashboard, the heap of junk that was the symbol of all things seized, dead, crapped-out. "I hate cars!" she cried. "I...hate...cars!"
     She loved cars, had loved them all her life. Her father had taught her the care of them. A fine mechanic, a hard worker, a good man. Sometimes they'd worked on boats, too. Her grade-school friends had fathers who had boats. They took her out in them sometimes, on the lake. She learned to fix the ones with engines. But she was enchanted by the ones with sails. They could fly, with no machinery. Sails were for flight, for dreams; engines were sensible, reliable. But maybe cars could fly, too--maybe her father had believed that when he built his little sportscar from scratch. A labor of love, hundreds of hours. He joked that he should be buried in it. Maybe it would speed him into the afterlife. But cars didn't fly, and cars didn't float, and when the little sportscar went into the spring waters of Lake Michigan at sixty miles an hour--her mother at the wheel, her father incapacitated--it sped them only into oblivion, and away from Melanie forever.
     She had a short prybar in her hand, grotty with lint. She would smash the dashboard first, the steering column, the dials and the delicate control arms. She would rip the vinyl seats until stuffing came out. She would stand in the wind and rain and batter the chassis and the headlights and the taillights and the mirrors and the windows and then she would release the handbrake and give it a good push from the driver's side and get in and roll until there wasn't any landing anymore, and maybe the guardrail would stop her and maybe it wouldn't, maybe there would be a boat to crash down onto or maybe not, she would just close her eyes and let the car take her--
     The window rang dully under rapping knuckles. She was confused, thinking it was herself, both inside and outside the car. But she was still in her seat, clutching a lint-specked prybar. Someone else was banging on the window.
     She rubbed breath-fog away with a damp sleeve. Through the beaded clarity, a hairy, rutted face peered in from under a ludicrous rubber hat streaming rain.
     Keeping the prybar in her right hand, she cranked the window down with her left.
      "It's just me, Henry Gordon," the old seaman said. "You forgot your jacket." He untoggled his yellow slicker and wrestled the bulky leather out, passing it through to her, dry.
     She put it on the passenger seat. "Thank you," she said. Her voice was a painful rasp.
     They stared at each other for a moment. Then he said, "You're sleeping rough tonight."
     She said nothing. What next? He'd invite her up to his place to see his fly-tying collection?
     "Listen now," he said. "Don't take this wrong."
     Here it comes.
     "I can offer you a job, if you're interested. If you can haul sheets and peel spuds."
     She laughed. "Oh, really?"
     "It's up to you," he said. "There's a schooner in a shipyard in Rockport, due to sail on a six-day tomorrow morning." He pronounced it "skunnah," and for a moment she didn't know what he'd said. "Louisa Lee. She's short a cook's helper."
     Melanie blinked. "The North End Shipyard? There's no boat there called--"
     "North End's in Rockland. I said Rockport."
     "I've never heard of the Louisa."
     "Louisa Lee," he corrected. The tone in his voice made her suddenly aware of her cold, wet clothes, and of her loss.
     "I know it's late," he said. "I see that prybar in your lap. I won't even offer you a ride down to take a look at her, in a storm in the middle of the night. But I know your car's jaxed. And I'm short a galley hand."
     He wasn't smug or cajoling. He was a businessman presenting facts. She realized she was listening.
     He gave her directions: two miles down Bayview, a couple of turns, a white house with a mansard roof. He had to describe what a mansard roof was. "Go down the side road, around the bend with the overgrown hedge and the juniper. There's a wharf there. You get down to that wharf by eight A.M. tomorrow, I'll see you have a galley berth and some money in your pocket. If you're not there, no harm done, no offense taken." He paused, then added, "Things'll look brighter in the morning. This weather'll blow itself out by three or four. We'll be in the thick of it for a while after, but by dawn the sky'll be pretty as a pearl. You hang on till then. Right?"
     He did not seem to expect a reply. He nodded, then fastened his slicker and strode off, gait stiff. The storm swallowed his bright foul-weather gear before he was halfway across the lot.
     After a few minutes, when rainwater puddled around her feet, she closed the window.
     She shrugged into the biker jacket, then reached into the backseat and hauled her knapsack up next to her. Spare clothes and sneakers, toiletry kit, other odds and ends separated into plastic grocery bags. Her things--her entire life boiled down to one hastily packed overnight bag--would stay dry.
     She slid the prybar in, too.
     Then she got out, automatically locking the car--against all reason, for it was dead as a doornail and a tow would spare her junking it--and headed back up to Bayview and Main, her pack settled on her shoulders.
     Keep moving, or drown in the saturated air. Job or no job, trap or salvation--it didn't matter.
     Walking to Rockport was better than driving off a pier.


     She doglegged onto Bayview, slogged through a town crushed and silent under the force of the blow. No effrontery of unaffordable shelter here, just svelte galleries, curio shops, windows full of cashmere and souvenirs. They soon gave way to Cape houses, driveways, flowerbeds, mailboxes, all reduced to blurred shapes in the torrential dark.
     No cars swished by, not even a police cruiser making rounds. The storm drove her head down. The sidewalk came to an abrupt end, and her foot, expecting concrete, came down hard in grassy mud. The end of town.
     The road curved and straightened. The yellow line in its center disappeared. Low stone walls and fields came and went on either side. A white fence appeared on her right, a break in the trees on her left. The gray squares glimpsed in the strobes of lightning were headstones.
     A sprawling cemetery. It must be hundreds of yards long. Body after body lapsing into humus. All those granite monuments--Maine was full of granite, Maine provided the granite for half the gravestones in the country. So convenient to die here in the breeding ground of gravestones....
     She plodded on.
     Alone, in the night, in the dark, with only raging wind for company, she found her sins and failures diminished. She heard things in the wind's roar: voices she didn't know, or voices long forgotten, or the voice of her own mind. An old Polish lullaby ran round and round, soft, suggestive. It mutated into the dirgelike opening chords of a Hunter-Garcia song. Then the sounds her mind concocted at the edge of sleep, the yips and cries of a brain gnawing on itself.
     The oak trees and the tanbark verge fell away, leaving her the only spark of life in the sheeting dark. Even the lightning had gone. There was no light, no comfort. Just one more step, and one more after that, until she had become the motion of walking itself.
     At the second turn, she stumbled over a crack or a stick, flailed out, somehow grabbed her balance back--and was slammed down hard by a gust of wind. It happened so fast that at first she couldn't understand why she was lying on her knapsack, her open mouth filling with water.
     The torrent relaxed into a steady downpour.
     She got up stiffly. Water rushed around her ankles, the street become rapids; but it was only rainmelt now, fed by the memory of the storm as its heart moved away to sea.
     Her watch, a water-resistant Timex Ironman she had been given for her last birthday, read 3:23. Henry Gordon had been right on the money.
     Trees arched into the road she was supposed to take, made the passage look impenetrable. This road went up the arm of land that reached around to protect Rockport Harbor. At the end of it were Beauchamp Point and Deadman Point; she had memorized the local names, poring endlessly over maps, dreaming of being here instead of in the city where she belonged. The smell of mulch was strong. She stepped into the dark within the dark.
     The few houses were set well back in the trees; only porchlights told her they were there at all. But one came almost right up to the road. A house of peeling wood siding, once white. A house with dull, dead eyes, unlit. A broken windowpane emitted a fluty drone. A trellis crawled up the wraparound porch.
     The house had a mansard roof.
     Just past it was a muddy track. Her worn shoes were unable to dig purchase, and she slipped and flailed down the incline, grabbing at bushes that smelled like gin. The rain weakened to an intermittent spatter, like sea spray flung into her numb face, then stopped. The absence of tumult left her vulnerable in a cone of silence.
     Where the road bottomed out there was a sign. Bending close, she could just make the letters out, though the gold leaf was flaking, the paint faded:
CARLETON SHIPYARD

     The only passenger schooner out of Rockport was the Timberwind, a rugged, Maine-built former pilotboat. Rockport was a smaller town than Camden, less touristy. Probably the ship--Louisa Lee, he had emphasized--was privately owned. But that implied an ostentatious floating salon. What would something like that be doing moored in a place like this?
     It didn't matter. Right now a liar's money, or a poser's, was as green as anyone else's.
     She straightened, tugged the pack's straps higher on her shoulders. A wisp of fog drifted across the face of the sign.
     We'll be in the thick of it, he'd said. She hadn't been sure what he meant. Now she knew.
     She could feel her hands again, the grainy mud and chafed skin as she rubbed circulation back into them. She followed the prickly hedge until it gave out and gravel came underfoot. She could barely see three feet in front of her. There was a dull clinking--chains or swivels moving with the motion of water. The rise and fall of the ocean breathing. At intervals came a metallic screech and sigh.
     She took the prybar out of her pack.
     There had to be a dockhouse, someplace to sleep. The crunching of her workshoes on the gravel was too loud. The mist took on a slimy odor.
     Off in the saltgrass and Queen Anne's lace on the left side of the curving gravel road, an eight-foot-tall sawhorse of oxidizing iron I-beams came into view among piles of corrugated tin and granite blocks. Near it was a logjam of old dock pilings, frayed lines still attached. A pile of rusted chain looked like a mound of raw hamburger.
     A rowboat was turned upside down in the burdock, its white underside the bloated belly of a drowned thing. Near it was a patched skiff up on a wooden stand, abandoned, sheer flattened and timbers shrunken and separated by too long in the sun and freshwater rain. A plaque affixed at the stern bore the name MERGATROYD. Someone's special skiff, lovingly made, specially named--left to rot.
     There would be no millionaire's yacht here, no sixty-foot fiberglass sloop belonging to some yuppie with more money than was good for him.
     Farther along, next to a canted section of chain-link fence, was a rotted deckhouse that looked like something salvaged from a wreck. Beyond it, in the roiling, somersaulting fog, something like the rib cage of a whale emerged. A whale that had rolled over and died and rotted where it lay, flesh and blubber sloughing away until only its great bones remained--until even those had turned gray, lichenous, moldy. A ladder ran up one side. Hooks dangled from the topmost rib; from the lower ribs hung lengths of rope in loops and tangles. A metal slipway was its spine.
     A boat cradle. A scaffolding to build a ship, or to hold a ship in drydock while its hull and keel were scraped and painted. It embraced only fog and darkness. Whatever vessels it had given birth to, or rebirth, were long gone.
     The mist had brightened into an unnatural phosphorescence. Somewhere in the smoky whiteness, the metallic thing gave a grating shriek and died away into echoes.
     The eerie husks of things once full of grace and beauty, the odor, the keens and moans, were too much; but she was here. She needed shelter. There was nowhere else to go.
     She pressed on. The loose gravel underfoot felt like broken marbles. The fog blanketed her, sent questing tendrils under her clothes, across her skin, a violation.
     The mist was so luminous here that it induced a kind of blindness. It was formless, patternless, ever-changing; it laid a threat of somnolence over every movement.
     She blundered hard into a damp gray wall. Mesmerized, she had let her fending hand drop back to her side. Her fingertips met weathered wood.
     The dockhouse. She felt along the wall until she found a corner, and turned it, in search of a door. She avoided propeller blades, corroded anchors, a hoop- sprung barrel. Her hand caught on a wall over the wall: a sliding door.
     Padlocked shut. She jammed the prybar into the rusty loop and twisted hard. It would have snapped with half the effort.
     The door rolled aside with a rumble of ancient casters. The interior smelled sour. As her eyes adjusted, she made out an A-frame roof with low, raw rafters, as if an attic had been planned and never completed. There were bandsaws, vises, power drills. Ladders hung between shelves holding crusty paintbrushes and cables. In the far corner, an entire dory dangled from the beams. She stepped gingerly past drums with vile contents, old tires, a rusting lawnmower, bins of bolts and pins and screws.
     Space yawned open to the right. The building was L-shaped. At the far end, a vertical line of brightness formed.
     Melanie's footsteps creaked and echoed in the open space. The hairline light showed rubber fenders hanging from the walls among lanterns and coils of rope. The line was the crack in the side of another door, sunken on its hinges and no longer plumb. She reached out, found the loose knob, and pulled.
     It opened on swirling white more intense than the pale mist she had left at the building's entrance. The oily stench was powerful, carried in by a waft of damp.
     She might step through this door and find herself in another century...a world that tourists never saw as they strolled through pastel harbor towns and watched sail-winged ships fly across historic waters.
     The dense glare paled to translucence, became recognizable as mist again, and began to lift.
     Gray planks laid themselves down, warped and uneven, in front of her. Dock pilings rose up to protect them. A metal gangway extruded itself, tilted downward; its aluminum handrails gave off the dull gleam of pewter. At its bottom end, more planks appeared, bucking in the swells: a floating dock.
     A camel fender rubbed against the pilings and cried out like a porpoise dying. The aluminum gangway shifted and pulled in its rusty iron braces, a sound like all the voices of Hell reverberating down its length.
     Beside the float, rising up to eye level and then far above, a ship took form.
     The curve of her sheer came first, accentuated by a hint of deckhouses, a protuberance of barrels. The bowsprit sprouted like a narwhal's horn. Her hull filled in, a pale mass against the paler tumble of receding mist. Masts emerged, the midships mainmast higher than the foremast, both impossibly high. The crosstrees looked abbreviated, accidental. Shrouds and stays, ladders and rigging cobwebbed the silhouette, as if it had rested where it was for a hundred years. Davits curled out from the near side, clutching a small skiff.
     The fog had nearly dissipated. The ship took on a silvery sheen against the reassertion of night. Where its lines had been inked black on misty gray, now a lambent hull glowed against the darkness, furled sails took on a silken luminescence.
     Melanie stepped toward the wharf railing. There might be people aboard--crew, or even passengers. Sunday night was boarding night on the regular schooners, a time to settle into cabins, get accustomed to tight quarters, learn to negotiate companionways, to pump the head. No anchor lights were lit, and no one seemed to be on watch, but somebody might be awake below.
     She could board it. She could find an empty berth and strip down and wrap herself in a rough blanket. I'm galley staff, she'd say. I'm crew. Henry Gordon hired me last night. But she was a wreck--hair matted, cheek welted from a whipping branch, clothes muddy. They wouldn't believe her.
     The damp and cold had gone beyond discomfort. She pulled her eyes away from the ship and stepped back into the dockhouse, found her way to a loosely folded pile of sailcloth.
     The sails were canvas; she hadn't thought any of the schooners used real canvas sail anymore. They had a yeasty smell. She burrowed in, desperate to trap body heat, and curled around her backpack. Such a long time since she'd gone to sleep to the comfortable murmur of downstairs conversation...
     She tugged the heavy linen together where her passage had opened it to the air. The iridescent silhouette shimmered against her inner eyelids, worming into her dreaming mind as she had wormed between the canvas folds.

From Moontide, copyright © 2001 Erin Patrick.