There's Something in the Water...

O’ Neil lent over the stern to read a buoy, 664, good, the Seymour G was making good headway. The fog made it difficult to judge. It sucked away sound and curdled their sight. The currents were strong this late at night, this time of year. O’Neil steered the small boat nearer the Rock than he usually liked but the water gave less resistance here, less undertow.

Morelli ignored the fog. His grandma told him foggy ghost stories when he was a kid and it still gave him the creeps. Morelli smoked a cigarette between his pinkie and his fourth finger, missing the tip, so he could use his other fingers for net checking, darning them like a grandma. Give him that at least, O’Neil thought: he’s a worker. O’Neil liked the fog it was cool, calm, still, like visiting a heaven…now that was his grandma talking.

Morelli swore softly he’d burnt his finger. He stomped the butt out on deck and then flicked it over board. He dipped his hand over the side into the black water. Then he started on his bad habit, as O’ Neil called talking. And Morelli only had two conversations.

The current shifted, Alcatraz was now to their starboard. On clear nights, the prison lights glared high above them. Morelli had convinced himself the cons partied, all night; the extravagant use of light was proof in his mind. Morelli with closed and relentless logic like a sea tide made this point every clear night.

“Too good for ‘em…partyin’ till dawn… Look at the lights man”.

O’Neil wondered if Morelli’s family had been so poor back in Naples lights were only used for high days and holidays.

O’Neil sighed with the sea, cons feasting on light and potatoes.  He’d been on the Rock once, only once, it chilled his gut even now. The whole island tasted of iron. He’d done a delivery and given a plumber a ride back across the bay. The plumber talked a little, mostly smoked, but he did say the prison canteen had giant knives painted on a wooden board so the wardens could tell which was missing and what to expect if things got nasty. “Mind you that ain’t the worst of it” The man trailed off and O’Neil didn’t ask for more. Even the wind avoided the place.

O’Neil enjoyed the damp fog…no Alcatraz rant tonight. It was the meteorite monologue instead. Morelli’s ambition was to collect meteorites, build a workshop to crush them down to “their component parts see what’s there and maybe make something off the dust” Morelli didn’t specify but he probably thought it would be like panning for gold.

O’Neil thought Morelli read too much (or possibly not enough) Readers’ Digest. Morelli was a natural sailor, a boat man born and bred but in his heart he resented the sea as meteorites disappeared beneath her surface never to be seen again. He had some fool scheme to move to Idaho and scour the countryside for cosmic debris. While his wife, a mild mannered Vietnamese girl with no figure O’Neil could detect, well this part of the plan was unclear-what would she do there?

She put her tiny foot down shouting at Morelli for the first and possibly the only time in their married life. O’Neil got the feeling Morelli was a good provider who could satisfy a woman. There was no way she was leaving her large family in the Heights for ID-A-HO. It must have been like Morelli asked her to move to the moon to catch meteorites.

Morelli wouldn’t let it lie, he now wondered if he should pick another big sky state, one that did not rhyme with the word no. O’Neil thought the problem went deeper than that.

O’Neil was listening to Morelli even though Morelli had stopped talking. O’Neil had heard it so often it was like a jingle that just played and played. Morelli was sitting very still, a slight frown across his heavy brow. The current was choppy again. O’Neil shifted his weight to steer the boat into another current.