John G. Thompson

Two Different Things

When I was sixteen my Uncle Afton and I tried to pull a boat from the bottom of Puget Sound. It was a twenty-two footer lost by some rich sport fishermen from Seattle. They’d gotten drunk and reckless one day and had left the boat at the bottom of the harbor with their empty bottles of malt liquor. To Uncle Afton and me the abandoned craft was a treasure. One summer we struggled to exhume It from the sea and make It worth something.

The year was 1970. Uncle Afton was sixty-eight and his wife, my Aunt Carol, was sixty-seven. Aunt Carol had throat cancer, and in the opaque, grimy light of morning I would hear the sister of my mother announce in the voice of a professional fighter that her corned beef hash was ready. She’d lean over the skillet and poke at the food with her spatula as if she were trying to revive a road-killed animal. Then she’d lift the cast iron pan and slam it down on the stove with the force of a kick or a punch. This is something I will always remember about my Aunt Carol: the way she fought with our meals.

Her cancer was supposed to be “better” during the summer Uncle Afton and I tried to salvage the boat. A year before she would not have been able to make the hash or even call out in her truculent voice; a year before Uncle Afton would have had to settle for his Pop Tarts and half-cooked bacon. I was with him during that time. The image of his helplessness is indelible: he’d fumble through the cupboard looking for the Pop Tart box. “Why does she hide these on me?” he’d mutter. Then he would eat the things untoasted. “They’re just as good uncooked,” he’d say, looking at me for approval. I would remain silent and eat one with him. After spending the last five summers with my aunt and uncle, I’d learned to subordinate myself to the conditions of their tragedy.

Their house was no more than a one-bedroom shack. It sat on the edge of dark forest and dark sand, but alone and hidden from the rest of a seaside village built on an Indian reservation. The ocean was one hundred feet from their door. The beach between the house and the sea was littered with the carcasses of old boats - my Uncle Afton’s maritime junkyard. He had everything you could imagine out there: a dozen or so diesel engines stripped of their vital parts, anchors of all sizes, winches, buoys, radios, all left out in the rain, all weathered and broken and useless.

A small pier took off directly in front of the house and cut into the ocean with about fifty feet of contorted wood and rickety pilings exposed during low tide. Uncle Afton said he’d built the dock. My Aunt Carol privately disputed him. “It was there when we moved in,” she’d said in her coarse yet sublime voice. “Your uncle has this fantasy about building and fixing things.”

It was more than a fantasy, it was a kind of religious dementia. My uncle did not have a fragment of aptitude for anything mechanical, but insisted the opposite. He even wore this silly looking set of mechanic’s overalls around the house; they were oversized and hung on his compressed frame like a tarp. He wore his toolbelt everywhere except to bed, slinging it over the bedpost so it would be within reach as soon as he woke. Once, after Aunt Carol had had an especially bad night and had to sleep with her oxygen tank, my uncle actually slept with the belt still strapped to his side, as if this were his meager way of sharing his wife’s burden.

I never openly mocked my uncle about his delusion of having an aptitude for mechanics; following him around inside his mental invention was an adventure, especially when we found the boat.

“I saw it go down,” he said. “It just sank. No wind. Nothing. I heard a lot of yelling and saw the clowns dive into the water like rats. They were drunk. They’d been drinking malt liquor all day. The crazy bastards should’ve never been able to set foot in a nice boat like that.”

We were standing on the dock at high tide when Uncle Afton told me this. The sun was setting and long shadows of Douglas fir and pine extended beyond the pier. This was my favorite time on the beach at my aunt and uncle’s house. It was then I knew for certain I was in another world and out of the sterile and ugly neighborhoods of Los Angeles. I would have lived year-round with Uncle Afton and Aunt Carol if the decision were mine, though fleetingly I’d want to return home when I’d hear Aunt Carol’s raspy cough and watch her lug around her oxygen tank. Still, even as a teenager, I sensed it was good for me to witness my aunt’s misery. She was dying, yet watching the way she so nobly endured it all helped me define virtue, dignity. She accepted her condition, recognizing life as a jagged cycle of birth, toil, and then demise. She limped through it all, her oxygen tank in tow, and never complained.

“Some people are just fools,” Uncle Afton went on as we stood on the pier he claimed to have built.

“I know,” I said. He looked at me. He removed his mechanic’s hat and exposed his hair, the color of galvanized steel. With the soft light of the descending sun on his skin, he seemed younger. Just then I considered him my own age. I excused his clumsiness, his odd way of doing things.

“You look like your Aunt Carol’s sister,” he said.

“My mom, you mean?” Even his assertions were awkward.

“That’s right. You got the same high cheekbones. Your mother’s a handsome woman.”

“Does that make me handsome?”

He blew air through his teeth. He gazed out at the place on the bay where the boat had sunk.

“Do you want to try it in the morning?” he said.

“What?”

“Pulling up the boat. Haven’t you been listening?”

“Yes. I want to pull up the boat.”

“We’ll need to get up early. Before light.”

“That’s all right.”

He laughed.

“No, it isn’t. It’s always harder than hell getting you up. It’s that hair of yours. It’s that goddamned long hair.”

He reached out and scrubbed my scalp with the palm of his starfish hands.

“What does my hair have to do with anything?”

“It makes you lazy.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really. It makes you think you can do anything you want, that you don’t have to answer to anyone. So you think you can just sleep in and do anything you want.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I should have your Aunt Carol cut it for you. She used to do that, you know.”

“Cut hair?”

“Yes. She had her own beauty shop in Michigan.”

“A beauty shop?”

“That’s right. She talks about it sometimes; I don’t know if she feels like she’d be happier doing that than living out here.”

Uncle Afton put his hat back on. He folded his arms across his chest. He stared hard at the spot on the water, as if he could see all the way to the bottom but wasn’t going to tell anybody about what he saw.

“I’ll get up the first time you call me,” I said. “I want to see what that boat looks like. Maybe there’s money or something.”

“Or maybe a body.”

“What?”

“One of them never came up.”

“What?”

“The men on the boat. There were three of them and only two came out. The cops were out here for three days dragging cables. They had about a half-dozen divers go down but they couldn’t find anything.”

“Why didn’t they pull the boat up? Maybe he was stuck inside it.”

“There was no need. The divers would’ve found him if he was there. It would’ve been a waste of time and money. Lucky for us.”

“What?”

“I said ‘lucky for us.”’

“Why?”

“The boat would be gone. Now it’s ours - if we can get it. It won’t be easy; that’s why I want you out of the sack as soon as I call you, damn it.”

“I will.”

I said this as if I were committing myself to battle. The news about the possible corpse stunned me, and for the first time the proposition of pulling up the boat became a test of courage instead of a sanguine adventure.

“So,” Uncle Afton said. “Let’s get back to the house and check on your aunt and then get to bed.”

“Good,” I said. Then we turned and walked down the pier. About half-way Uncle Afton stopped and looked at me. He put his hand on my shoulder. “You know,” he said. His fingers pressed hard on my muscle as if he needed to steady himself. “This isn’t going to be easy. It could even be a little dangerous. I think we should keep this our secret,” he said. “Let’s not tell your Aunt Carol what we’re up to —and don’t you tell your mom and dad when you get back home. Is this a deal?”

“Yeah,” I said, imprudently.

“All right, then,” he said, and we walked more swiftly to the house.
 
 

Aunt Carol’s fierce cough met us when we entered her kitchen. She stood over her little gas stove and fought with a skillet of chicken-fried steak. She coughed directly over the food and did not cover her mouth. Uncle Afton watched her indignantly, but said nothing about her unsanitary behavior.

“Smells good,” he said.

“I’m reheating it,” Aunt Carol said, coughing. “It’s been ready for an hour. What have you two been doing?”

“Fiddling,” said my Uncle. Then he went to her and wrapped his arms around her waist. She did not acknowledge him. She kept on with her battle with the chicken-fried steak. The way my uncle held on to her as she worked was a scene everlasting. They were, just then, two reluctant and tired old lovers. My uncle’s buckle of starfish hands clamped at her waist, my aunt’s stoical acceptance of the confinement, my uncle’s dependence upon her; all this was present in what I saw. He held her as if he were clinging to a rock. When she coughed his body jolted with hers. He was being dragged through her disease with her. Perhaps it was his way of paying her back. All along in their marriage it had been Afton who’d dragged Carol around. For forty-one years Carol accommodated his fantasies. In 1930 he sold himself to her by lying that he had a scholarship to Purdue to study mechanical engineering. The truth was he had barely passed high school and had no more a chance of getting into Purdue than being elected President of the United States. The closest he would ever come to being an engineer was his job as a maintenance man at the city hospital. He would continue to deceive himself, though, and would even lie outright about his job title. “I’m an engineer,” I once heard him answer the “What do you do?” question from an acquaintance at a family barbecue. Afton muttered his reply, then gazed around apprehensively to see if a member of the family had heard him. I did, but my Uncle wasn’t aware. And if he were he would have not, I believe, been all that humiliated. Among our family my Uncle’s fantasies were accepted as a sort of handicap.

“Fiddling with what?” Aunt Carol asked.

“Some of the old boats,” replied Uncle Afton. “We’re salvaging parts.”

“For what?”

“To sell.”

“Good.”

My aunt said the last word in the most maternal way I’d ever heard her speak to her husband. “Good.” It was like an assertive blessing, partly thankful, partly condemning. It meant she had had enough of his junk collecting; it meant she knew it was time to clean out some of their things and make way for her death. Her final stand to him would be to rid herself of all his material, useless crap —the shrapnel of his dreams. “Good,” she said again, and my uncle’s hands unwound at her waist and hung freely at his sides. “It’s...” my aunt started, but was cut off by her cough. She would go into a spasm of coughing this time, and my uncle would have to go into their bedroom and get her  oxygen tank. The coughing became so violent he had to help her back to bed and tuck the tank into the blankets next to her, as if she were a child demanding her favorite stuffed animal. Finally the coughing ceased and my aunt was resting peacefully. Uncle Afton returned to the kitchen and served up the chicken-fried steak. It had gotten cold, but, in silence, we ate.
 
 

Uncle Afton and I went to bed with only three words passing between us. “Up at four.” I followed his command and crawled like a soldier into my sleeping bag on the back porch where my cot was set up, but I did not sleep. Two things - two different things, kept me awake. Both were connected to questions about death: What if there really was a corpse trapped within the crannies of the sunken boat? I wondered if my uncle were telling the truth, or if he used the proposition merely to motivate me, to be certain I would be “up at four.” Still, I saw it as a real challenge, a test of bravery. I imagined what the corpse might look like: skeletal, but with enough flesh remaining to give it the power of a haunting image I’d never forget. Perhaps the Dungeness crabs had gotten to it and would still be clinging like scabs to the man’s parts. Would he be wearing clothes? Would he stink? Was it morally right that we were even doing this, pulling a man from his natural grave?

That was the one thing, the other was the image of my Aunt Carol coughing so deathlike over the skillet of chicken fried steak, then my Uncle’s struggle to get her back to bed with her oxygen tank. I knew that night as I lay awake on my cot that I would never forget this picture. Aunt Carol would be dead in a few months, maybe a year, but I would always remember the way she and her husband’s body jolted at the same time whenever she coughed. What would Uncle Afton do after she died? Would he go on collecting his junk and pretending he was something he wasn’t? Would he change? I was only sixteen but I knew enough to ask the question at least to myself, and it would — like the prospect of pulling a corpse out from under the boat — keep me awake until the rise of Uncle Afton’s voice saying “Let’s go,” saved me from my tormenting thoughts.
 
 

He must have gotten up at least an hour before I, for he had our skiff loaded with all sorts of mechanical gadgets and what seemed to be miles of cable and rope. He was wearing his silly mechanic’s uniform, but it looked as if he’d tried to iron it and press uneven creases in the pant legs and shirt sleeves. He wore rubber boots and his corny-looking hat. His silver hair flipped up over his ears and protruded from his temple like a ledge of steel wool.

“Let’s go,” he said again as he used the heel of his boot to keep the boat close to the dock. He looked awkward and ridiculous, using his leg for something it was not intended. The skiff began to drift away from the pier and my uncle did the splits. “Let’s go, goddamnit!” he said as his legs spread like a gymnast’s. “I can’t hold this bastard forever.”

I jumped in and Uncle Afton followed. In a moment of unexpected grace he pushed the skiff away from the dock and climbed aboard and we drifted out. He returned to his clumsy ways, though, when he tried starting the outboard, pulling on the rope with such jerky and erratic motions that its spring became disengaged and we were left with no way to start the motor. He pulled his mechanic’s hat so tight over his head that his ears flared like boat rudders. He swore as I’d never heard a man swear. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ...mother fuckin’ ...goddamn it all to hell... holy rotten bastard...son of a fuckin’ bitch...” he sputtered in place of the unstarted engine. As he ranted our skiff drifted into the bay.

“We’re up shit creek,” he said. “But we got a paddle,” he added, reaching under the ball of rope and cable and drawing out a pair of oars. He gave them to me. “All right,” he said. “Now you earn your dinner.”

I rowed our skiff into open water. “How do you know where the boat went down?” I asked.

“I know,” said Uncle Afton. “You’re almost there. Just keep going.”

I took the boat to the middle of the bay and stopped to rest. My uncle gave meaning to my respite, thinking I’d stopped because I’d sensed we were over the sunken craft.

“You know,” he said. “I think we’re right on top of her.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I know it. We’re right over her. Now give me a hand with these lines. It’s real shallow here. No more than fifteen feet. We...”

“But how are we going to pull it up?” I interjected.

At this Uncle Afton laughed in a way so sinister and cunning I wondered if being out on the open water did something to him, transformed him like Jekyll into Hyde. As he laughed he reached under the ball of rope and cable and pulled out a wetsuit, fins, and a mask he had hid from me.

“Your mom says you’re on the high school swim team; she’s always bragging to her sister about all the trophies you win. Well, Mr. Trophy Swimmer, let’s see what you can do.”

Just then I hated my uncle. He was using me to compensate for his buffoonery, using my strength and desire to live up to a challenge as an escape from his unreachable dreams. If things didn’t turn out, I could be blamed. “It was the kid’s fault,” he’d tell himself, and anyone else who still listened to him.

“All right,” I said, reaching for the gear. “I’ll do it,” I said, oddly defiant. “Now you drop anchor.”

“What?” he said.

“I said I’ll get this on and you drop anchor.”

Uncle Afton’s jaw jutted out and then worked from side to side in the cadence of a wiper blade. His face reddened and an archipelago of sweat erupted in the center of his forehead.

He’d forgotten an anchor, even though he had hundreds of them.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll just keep her steady with the oars. Now listen to what I’m going to tell you.”

Silence.

“I’m listening.”

“Okay. We’re going to use some of this line as a tether. You tie it around your waist and I’ll make sure you got plenty of slack.”

“Why don’t I just swim around on my own?”

“‘Cause I don’t want to lose you, goddamnit!”

“But maybe I’ll get tangled up in it.”

“JESUS CHRIST! YOU WON’T GET TANGLED UP! JUST LISTEN!”

“Okay. I’m listening.”

“All right, like I said, it’s real shallow here. You shouldn’t have to hold your breath more than a minute to get all the way to the bottom and look around.”

“I can do that.”

“Good.”

“What do I do if I see the boat?”

“You come up and tell me. I give you a cable. You go down again. You hook the cable on the boat.”

“But how are we going to pull it up? It’s going to be heavy.”

Uncle Afton’s jaws shifted from side to side again and more sweat formed across his brow.

The small detail had eluded him.

“Never mind about that for right now. We’ll worry about it if and when you latch on to the boat. All right?”

“Yeah.”

“If we have to we’ll stick a buoy on her and come back later with a winch.”

“Did you bring any buoys?”

“DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT. JESUS!”

“Okay. I won’t.”

I had stripped down to my underwear and began pulling the wetsuit on.

“It’s too small,” I said. It was.

“Oh, come on. Don’t tell me that.”

“Well, it is.”

“So are you telling me you can’t put it on?”

“I might be able to.”

“Well, give it a try. It’ll stretch out after you’ve worn it a while.”

“No it won’t.”

“Yes, it will. That kind of material stretches out.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

“Well just try it.”

I managed to get the suit on but felt as if I were wearing a body cast.

“Can you wear it?”

“Yeah, I guess. But it’s a little hard to breathe.”

“Well, it’ll stretch out.”

The fins and mask fit well and so I was ready. I sat on the edge of the skiff and Uncle Afton tied the line around my waist.

“You’re set,” he said.

I didn’t move. I was afraid. The water was still and dark; there could be a corpse beneath it, a pod of killer whales, a fatal current. I sat paralyzed on the edge of the boat. “Go ahead,” I heard my uncle demand, and then, In the distance, the hideous cough of my Aunt Carol. Her bark carried like a vivid voice over the water, as if she were in the skiff with us. My uncle looked toward the house. The hacking kept on just as it had kept on the night before. Then it stopped and after a moment rose again, but less fierce and foreboding. My uncle looked at me.

“Are you going in or not?”

“Yes, I’m going in,” I said.

I held my breath and slid off the rail into the water. I stayed on the surface until my heart stopped racing and I felt at ease.

“You won’t find anything up there,” Uncle Afton said. “You gotta go under.”

I dove below the surface but could see nothing. I continued my descent until I felt the rope at my waist snag so abruptly it jolted air from my lungs. I surfaced.

“That wasn’t very long. What’s the matter?” said Uncle Afton, standing in the skiff.

“The rope caught on something. It almost knocked the wind out of me.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ. Can’t you even...”

He stopped suddenly as he looked down at his feet and then did a frantic and clumsy soft-shoe dance. He had been standing on the rope.

“All right,” he said. “You’re good to go now.”

“Yeah, but the water’s too murky. I can’t see anything.”

“What do you mean? I told you, it’s shallow.”

“Not that shallow.”

He put his hands on his waist and stared at me. Then we heard Aunt Carol’s coughing again and he gazed toward the house.

Her cough was deeper and more violent this time. Uncle Afton stood in the skiff and stared at the house for what seemed a long time. Finally he glanced over at me and waved me in. “We gotta get back,” he said.
 
 

The coughing had ceased by the time we reached the dock. The silence was so ominous my uncle, I believe, knew Aunt Carol was dead even before he tied the boat off, before we trotted down the pier to the house and found her curled up on the kitchen floor, her body contracted as if death stopped her in the middle of one of her coughs. Her eyes were open. Her long gray hair flared over white linoleum. She wore a flowery apron. A spatula rested in the cage of her fingers.

Uncle Afton squatted next to her, reached over and closed her eyes. Then he withdrew his hand and folded both arms over his chest and simply sat on the floor in silence and stared at her. I stood behind him, still in my wetsuit, dripping.

“I made all the arrangements,” he said. His voice was strangely solid. “It’s all taken care of,” he said, and I will remember the moments just after then as if they are being witnessed again as the man I now am. I remember the way he told me to reach into his wallet and retrieve the piece of paper onto which he’d written a checklist of things to do when Aunt Carol died. He was prepared.

—call ambulance

—call Everlasting Life Mortuary in Everett

—call her sister

—call all her friends

—get rid of all my junk.
 
 

I still have the little piece of paper. I have kept it in a box within a drawer for twenty-five years. The afternoon of the day Aunt Carol died Uncle Afton left the note on top of the refrigerator and I took the liberty to slip it into the pocket of my jeans. By then she had been taken to the Everlasting Life Mortuary and my uncle had already completed every item on the list, except the last.

Completion of the final task would take him three or four years. It had taken him almost thirty years to accumulate all his maritime junk, so getting rid of it would not happen quickly. When the last of it was gone my uncle died. He developed prostate cancer only one year after Aunt Carol’s death and refused treatment. I traveled alone on a Greyhound bus all the way from Los Angeles to Everett, Washington, to attend his funeral. I was twenty.

There were only a few mourners, mostly old neighbors from the seaside village where Uncle Afton and Aunt Carol had lived. “So you’re Afton’s nephew,” one man had said. “He talked about you a lot. He was always excited when he knew you were coming up to see him,” the man said. Until then I had positioned my sadness about my uncle’s death into a sort of neutrality. Until then.

I didn’t go out to the cemetery to watch Uncle Afton’s coffin placed into the ground next to Aunt Carol’s. Instead I drove out to their shack on Puget Sound and walked out to the end of the dock near their place. I gazed to the spot where the boat had supposedly gone down, where there still could remain a corpse at the bottom of the bay. Had my uncle lied about the whole thing? I wondered. Was there really a boat at all, let alone a body? I would never know. Now my uncle’s realities and fantasies would become indistinguishable forever. The forms of what is true and what is a lie will swirl together like colors no one or no thing can separate once the span of death and eternity have mixed them. I stared at the water a long time, even wondering if I should come back someday and settle once and for all if the boat was really there. Then, as if the spirit of my uncle were turning in the trees behind me, I abruptly rejected the thought. I did it when I heard the wind move in gusts through the forest, blowing like the spasms of my Aunt Carol’s final breaths.