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

Sometimes after studying he would go to the corner diner and order the ham and cheese omelette with coffee. From the diner he could hear the music from the strip of bars, and after eating he would walk by them and sometimes go insideand stand by himself amid the jostling crowds, pulsing beat, and drugs and beer to watch the girls dancing.
    Adjusting to college in Washington, D.C., had been difficult the first time. But at Georgetown he had found Matty and Kate, or they had found him. Making other friends followed, and he had gradually begun to enjoy the city. When the bank first garnisheed Pappy’s accounts, he had transferred to the less expensive state college in Baltimore, and there he’d found things harder. After class he would sometimes cross the parking lots behind the mall and walk into the strip of trees, sit on the pine needles with his back against the resined bark, and study the light in the leaves. He would close his eyes to shut out the congestion he felt around him. Sometimes he’d sit through the receding of the light from dusk to dark.
    He spoke regularly with Kate on the telephone though, and Matty also, and their kindness helped sustain him. Kate was from the Washington suburbs and had all the latest gossip, news on the school, their classmates, on the city, anything. Sometimes she sent Clay records of a particular piano recording she had discovered and wanted him to hear. Even though she knew why Clay had needed to transfer, Kate liked to try to cajole him into coming back. She even offered to lend him the money, laughing, as though it were a trifle. She told Clay jokes over the phone and would laugh at her own stories. Occasionally she would put the phone on the piano top and play for him. The pieces she chose were always lyrical, adagio: Prokofiev, Chopin.
    He had returned to campus to salvage the winter semester, which ended the first week of April because the school was experimenting with a new five-week spring minisession. Though exams had never been difficult for him, the classes he had missed required some effort to make up, and his decision had left him distracted and with little motivation for studying. Still, he finished his tests, then went to the registrar’s office and signed the necessarypapers for his leave of absence. Back at his room by the railroad tracks, his few belongings were already packed—clothes mostly, some record albums, and a secondhand stereo. Now, for some reason, he heard the train. One last time, he thought. He picked up the phone and called Matty and told him his decision and plan. Matty didn’t seem to approve. They had a long discussion. Kate got on the phone after. She listened without saying anything as he told her he needed to make this change. She said she wanted him to do it too. She told him that she was learning that people needed to follow what they felt in their bones.
    Leaving the campus, he drove out of the city to the beltway and around toward Annapolis. There was little traffic. He turned on the radio and listened to the news for a while. President Nixon was returning from California. McGovern and Humphrey were battling it out in the Democratic primaries. The Paris peace talks had stalled again. The negotiators were at odds over the shape of the bargaining table. He changed the channel and listened to Country Joe and the Fish singing “one, two, three, what are we fighting for . . .” The news came back on and he turned off the radio and started thinking about all he had to do to get ready. The day was cold and clear. Driving over the Bay Bridge, he could see south past Thomas Point to the West River, and north past the Magothy to Gibson Island and beyond, where the horizon met the sky in a thin stream of silver vapor. A single oyster dredger moved under sail plowing the banks below Rock Hall. She was running with the wind, and her sails were spread wing on wing; she looked like a huge white seabird puffed out proud and steady