Read Online The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay by Tim Junkin - Free Book Online

ended up talking and laughing and finally dancing a slow dance with Paula Firth, the waitress from his lunch with Bertha. He bought her several rum drinks and danced with her again. Her voice was deep as she talked in his ear, and with her arms around his waist, she began to move against him to the music. He smelled her sweat, her earthy scent, and felt her sigh deeply, her body gradually surrendering against his. They danced, finished dancing, waited for the music, and danced again. He bought her another drink and told her she smelled delicious and that her crab cake had been good too. He asked her if she would like to leave with him and she said yes. They drove together out to the old ferry dock and parked and began to kiss. Clay studied her face, which seemed to capture all of the light in the half-moon sky, and kissed her again. Paula let him unbutton her cowboy shirt slowly and part it, and she looked at him and never said a word. She held his head in her hands as he kissed her breasts and belly and then unzipped and pulled off her skirt. Clay took off all of her clothes and then his as well because he wanted to feel her completely against and around him and was lost with her and afraid only that she would tell him to stop. When they were finished, they lay tangled together for a long while, listening to the radio play country songs. Clay felt grateful. He wasn’t quite sure how it happened or even who this was that he was with. He asked her if she might like to go to the truck stop and have breakfast, but she said that she had to work in the morning and needed to get home. She kissed him on the cheek and started looking for her clothes. They helped each other dress,and then he started the engine and drove her back to her car. Before she left, Clay thanked her, and she looked at him as though he were strange. He then told her that he had to go back to college for a week or two, to arrange some things, but would like to see her again when he got home. She said sure, to call her if he felt like it. Then she told him he was sweet, and she got out.
    Clay watched her until she had started her car and was pulling out of the lot. Then he turned and headed down the highway for the farmhouse.
    The next day, Saturday, he tried to call Paula but got no answer. Byron was nowhere around, either, so he left him a note. He drove to town and went by the restaurant where Paula worked but was told she was off. It had started to rain.
    He stopped off at Bertha’s to say good-bye. She started to cry. He held her hands and talked to her for a while. He fixed her a cup of tea. She told him she wanted him to go but that for her his departure seemed a breaking off. He told her that it seemed that way for him as well.
    They sat in silence for a while, listening to the rain against the windows. Finally, when it felt right, he kissed her on the cheek and left. In the rain and fog he drove down Route 50 toward the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, alone, watching the corroded wipers on his windshield smear the water back and forth.

6
    The place where he slept, near the University of Maryland campus in Baltimore, was next to the railroad track. Though it came by several times a day, he had already stopped hearing the train sometime before. He subleased a small back room from a graduate student who was constantly stoned and who kept his rent money and seldom paid the landlord. Every week or so the landlord would come by and beat on the door, hollering, and the graduate student would haul out the back window and down the fire escape.
    It was a five-minute drive to class, but he could never find a place to park, so he usually walked. He cut through a maze of fast-food parking lots, then walked adjacent to the boulevard and by the time he got to class felt stained from the smell of grease and the soot and smoke of the traffic. Before the news of his father, he had worked three afternoons a week at a checkout counter at Safeway. At night he would study.