A SPECIAL THREE-PART SERIES:
Part 2: Sailing Memories
Near Mackinac Island
My two strongest memories of Tony Kantola are these: in the first, he’s smiling at me, a blonde kid in an out-of-style butch haircut in an era of long hair. Like our youth, it disappeared and came back in style a quarter-century later as a buzzcut. It’s the second one that matters because in it, he’s lying on the bathroom floor of his house with purple drool running out of his mouth and a plastic bottle of drain cleaner near his clenched right hand. I never saw him that way. It’s how it was described to me by many people over the days, weeks, and months after his death.
He was my best friend. We were fourteen, almost fifteen when he did it. I have thought of it for twenty years, practically every day, wherever I’ve been.
This time, while I was sitting on a hatch cover amidships of a Great Lakes ore freighter named the Charles M. Pierce, we were just abreast of Mackinac Island about midway in the Straits. Even without binoculars, you could make out the massive front porch of the Grand Hotel on Lake Shore Boulevard and see the tops of old Fort Mackinac on the bluffs. It was the balmy summer day that gives sailors on the lakes a big dose of “channel fever,” a desire to get off their floating factories and mingle with other human beings who don’t wear steel-toed boots to the dining room or limit their vocabularies.
A flotilla of pleasure craft surrounded the island, sails dipping in the offshore winds, including some big luxury yachts that looked like they were planning a beach assault on the tourists ashore. I watched sailboats tack gracefully and wondered how it would feel to ride the waves from a flying bridge of one of those pleasure boats instead of this thousand-foot, steel-plated behemoth that pushed its way down lakes at eleven knots through a gentle chop. All I could feel was the sun warming the deck plates under my hands. After two decades on the water, starting as a deckhand, then as an able seaman, promoted to deck watch, and finally to wheelsman, I had earned my sea legs, and only the roughest weather in the late fall would make walking a deck more challenging than a short hike up a hill slope.
Today was different for two reasons. First, I had my boyhood friend’s suicide in my head worse than usual, and not even the sunlight or the pleasant view from deck could dispel it. Second, I had the printout from my third-mate’s test results in my pocket. I had perfect scores in Nautical Astronomy, Aids to Navigation, Navigation Procedures, Charts and Publications. I was in the mid-nineties in Navigation Instruments, Magnetic, and Gyro Compasses, Tides, and Currents. I did less well on Inland Navigation with a 93 (you need a score of 90 or better to pass the mate’s license). My grade on Magnetic and Gyro Compassing got me 89, which meant I would have to retake the test. The Captain himself handed me the results from his quarters on the Texas deck. He was encouraging when I showed him the results.
“You’ll get it next time, Jack,” he said.
I’m what you call a “hawsepiper,” someone who didn’t go to a maritime academy. A hawsepiper advances in rank by climbing up through the hawsepipe, the tube through which the anchor chain is drawn. It’s an affectionate term, for the most part, but I remember my first boat. I was working with a mate in the windlass room where the winch draws up the anchor chain. Its links are the size of a man’s foot. Sometimes, you need someone to guide the links onto the drum with a big crowbar. I was stepping over the chain when it suddenly let go. The speed of it whipping past my pants tore the heavy fabric of my work pants and left a scimitar-shaped scar across my leg I still have. The mate was hauling on the winch lever with all his strength and cursing—the slipped chain, the winch, me, and the boat. I still remember the deafening clang of metal as the massive links banged into the pipe’s rim e in a blur of speed while sparks flew all around. The mate’s bellowing was lost in the noise, and my mind was trying to process the fact I could have been dragged by that chain through a twelve-inch hawsepipe and come out like raw hamburger at the other end.
I focused my gaze on one speedboat with two big outboards behind it running up to us from the island’s leeward side. Its bow split the waters in half as neatly as if a giant’s hand was parting the water in front. I could make out a pair of couples up front and behind. I noticed Billy Riggins, the Pierce’s conveyor man, a hog farmer from Wisconsin, all cleaned up and enjoying his off-duty time in the sun. When we’re in port on a coal run, Billy is buried in the bowels of the ship and emerges in complete filth. The galley stewards give him garbage bags before he takes a seat on the bench, and the cooks won’t let him eat until he’s cleaned the coal grime from his hands and arms up to his elbows. Billy’s job is the filthiest aboard a lakeboat freighter, but never as much as when on a coal run. He leaned over the rail, watching the speedboat coming. He suddenly motioned toward the boat just as it turned to run parallel to the Pierce and bounced over the waves a dozen yards from us. Billy stood up and pantomimed removing his shirt several times.
The girls were pretty, with their hair flapping in the breeze. The two males were younger than Billy or me by ten years at least. The blonde up front removed her top and waved it over her head like a lasso. Billy hooted and clapped his hands like a kid at Christmas.
The boat raced off, spewing and bucking, back to the island. The laughter of those young people drowned in the fading roar of the outboard motors. Billy’s fun over, he moved toward the afterend to toss food to the gulls following us for scraps.
I tried to imagine Tony and I in that speedboat with a couple of girls beside us. It was too difficult to do because Tony was always young, always smiling the way he did. He wouldn’t let me age him, and he wouldn’t let me forget him.
I took the exam printouts I had folded in my pocket and tore the sheets into several pieces. I held my hand out and let the breeze carry the scraps. I watched them float away like giant cabbage moths, some alighting on the hatch covers beyond mine and being picked up again and blown off to the boat’s port side, where they flew off in a separate cluster. I gripped the rail wire and looked down at the curl of emerald water rising and falling in an unchanging rhythm of troughs and crests. It reminded me of my trig class in high school taught by a senile math teacher that the school picked up on the cheap—wave motion: sine, cosine, and tangent.
When I lifted my head, I noticed the Mackinac Island ferry making its turn for the dock. I used to see myself as someone living on that island among the few hundred other residents, riding a bike, watching horse-drawn carriages pass, and mingling with the summer tourists. It seemed to me I was always searching for an island of some kind. I knew I’d never see Mackinac Island again once we were in port in Northtown because I was getting off the boat for good. My sailing days were over. I concluded I’d been living in a dream, running away from something that had haunted me for those eighteen years since my best friend took a bottle of Drano from his mother’s pantry shelf and gulped it down.
That night in my bunk confirmed it. I was daydreaming of being back home, back in Northtown, and for some reason, thinking of winter. The wind coming off the lake used to make our foreheads burn. Tony and I were playing on the ice dunes—we called them that to distinguish them from the Pyramids at the slip where we dove off into the water during summers.
These dunes were built up by the crashing waves. The combination of wind, water that alternately froze and thawed at the shoreline, and the massive waves during squalls, all of those elements created these jagged hills of ice and sand tossed up by the churning wave action during thaws. Some of the dunes were hollowed ice caves where we slid on our backs right down to the water’s edge. Pockets of black ice made walking on them dangerous. On one winter day, not so bitterly cold with my cousin Mike, I put my booted foot through slush ice that gave way to the black water beneath. I managed to keep my balance, but in full winter clothing, submerging in that icy water would have meant a drowning death. The Water Works hill where we went sled-riding was not far from the dunes. The winter before, a boy I knew died when his sled careened off the hill into the trees, and he hit his head and instantly died.
It seems strange to realize how recklessly we cavorted in places that could have become our graves. Water—a rarity in the universe. Molecules sliding over one another when a gas or a solid state is the universe’s norm. But the day a friend came to get me to swim at Highland Beach, I ran around Bumstown with Tony. He drowned trying to save his sister from an undertow. I knew Mike once held me by one hand from the parapet of Harbor High School when he got the giggles. I swung around by his hand, unable to get a purchase with my foot. Finally, he pulled me up to safety. Thinking about it now, all of it, Tony especially, I want to find some people from that time, from my father’s generation, and smash their faces in. The whole lot of them, those know-it-all adults, who in the end, knew nothing at all and taught us nothing that mattered, like those crazy, sexually repressed nuns who used to beat us with rulers and lock us in coat closets when we didn’t learn fast enough. Liars, frauds, so ignorant, so stupid. People whose time is gone. They’ve walked over the cliff’s edge and never said goodbye. Now, here I am with my generation of imbeciles, arm in arm, a foot dangling over the brink, wondering why we didn’t do anything to help the ones behind us understand what we were facing. Me. I couldn’t prevent my friend from dying before high school.
-END of Part 2-
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Bumstown Reverie: A Mystery
By Terry White
BIO- Terry White was born and raised in Northeastern Ohio, Terry White has published several crime, noir, and hardboiled novels as well as genre and mainstream stories in various magazines and anthologies under such pseudonyms as Robb T. White and Terry White. Nominated for a Derringer in 2019, his crime story “Inside Man” was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2019. Betray Me Not (Grand Mal, 2022) was selected by the Independent Fiction Alliance as a Truly Independent Book of 2022.
Follow Terry White at:
TWITTER- @tomhaftmann
