Read Online America America by Ethan Canin - Free Book Online Page A

“
Sail
is still sail,” he said. “There’s no special word for that.”
    “You’re a soldier,” I said.
    “I guess I am.”
    “How long you back for?”
    “They gave me a week.”
    Later, when I was in college, some of my classmates talked about their older brothers living in Canada. For the kids I grew up with in Saline, though, Canada wasn’t an option. Certainly not for the son of Liam Metarey.
    “That scare you?” I asked.
    “Scare me?”
    “Being in Vietnam.”
    He laughed. “I assumed you meant being back here.” He unrolled a chart onto the stand and examined it. “I’m assigned to the Roads and Grounds Section of the Post Engineers,” he said. “C Company. Fort Dix.”
    I looked at him.
    “New Jersey,” he said.
    “Oh.”
    “They don’t send guys like me over to fight.”
    “I didn’t figure, really.”
    He looked at me appraisingly. “You want to know what I do?”
    “If you can say.”
    He laughed. “I pour asphalt. Set a few fence posts. Pull a tractor mow. Not too bad.” The edges of the chart began to flutter, and he turned his head and looked to the west. “Although I suppose a post could fall on me.” Then he patted me on the shoulder—something his father would do many times over the years. “But yeah,” he said, “I’d be plenty scared if they shipped me over.”
    He gripped the wheel with two hands and turned it, and in a moment the gust was on us. Then it passed, and I watched the craze of ripples skip away over the water.
    “You remember everything I told you so far, Corey?”
    “Port, left,” I said. “Starboard, right. Sheet, not rope.”
    “Perfect. Now you can drink at the captain’s club.”
    He turned to look ahead of us, where a Great Lakes freighter had come onto the horizon, and for some reason I turned the other way, where Clara, facing us now in her skirt at the rear railing, knit her brow at me and then slid off the deck into the water.
    “Hey!”
    I shook Andrew. Churchill ran to the stern, barking. The boat broke to the left and bit into a turn and I saw Clara kick out of the wake and throw back her hair and plunge under. Then Mr. Metarey was beside us. He took the wheel and turned the boat sharply into the wind so that the boom came around and the mainsail flapped thunderously above us. The hull went dead in the water and then bumped as the wake ran under it. Clara was already thirty yards back, her hair a black pelt in the dark water.
    “She can swim,” said Mrs. Metarey, reaching her head out of the cabin.
    Mr. Metarey looked back.
    “Don’t go around for her, Liam. She’ll catch up.”
    But Andrew had already gone forward to lower the sail and in a moment I heard the rumble of the engine from below. The boat swung in a broad arc and when we pulled alongside Clara she came shivering up the folding ladder onto the deck.
    “How was the water, dear?” said Mrs. Metarey. One shoe still dangled on her ankle.
    “Splendid, Mother.” She was staring furiously, at her father it seemed to me.
    Mr. Metarey went below for a moment and returned with a towel, which he tried to wrap around her; but she shrugged him away and draped it herself around her shoulders. Churchill was sitting calmly now. Andrew took off his sweater and put it over her, and then she stood there looking at all of them, her dark eyes passing from her mother to her father to Christian.
    “Well,” she said finally, “I fell in.”
    “Please,” said Mrs. Metarey.
    “Andrew came up short on a tack. I wasn’t expecting it.”
    “Churchill deems that unlikely,” said Christian.
    The dog let out a bark.
    “I never changed tack,” Andrew answered.
    “I seem to remember it the same way,” said Christian.
    “Well, I’m the one who fell in. You were all below.”
    “Nobody was below,” said Mrs. Metarey. She reached and yanked off her shoe.
    Clara looked around furiously. “Corey saw it, didn’t you? I fell in when Andrew veered.”
    “Ah, but we know Corey is a