“Destiny,” the woman said, smiling fondly at Catfish like he was forty going north as Daddy used to say although I never really knew what he meant by that.

  “Hey, Cat,” she said, “you know the course is closed today.”

  “Never stopped me before,” he said.

  “Take care, you old river.”

  From a narrow rise, I could see the golf course set between a yacht club and a stand of hardwoods, a southwest wind flapping the underbelly of leaves. I had never played golf. Didn’t know the first thing about the game, but when I looked at this course set beside the Detroit River I thought I’d never seen a more inviting stretch of secluded green. It looked to be an oasis at the fringe of a city given to the crime of revelry. A sign read, Belle Isle Golf Course Closed for Repairs.

  “What gets broke on a golf course?” I asked him.

  “The greens,” he said. “They’re doctoring the greens, but that won’t stop us.”

  “Why doesn’t that put me at ease?”

  “Come on,” he said, winking me on.

  We walked behind a Greens Keeper’s shed. Catfish lifted a tarp draped over a barrel and pulled out a set of golf clubs in a snappy two-toned khaki bag.

  “Finders keepers,” he said.

  He pulled out a club from the bag.

  “This is a driver,” Catfish said. “It’s the biggest club in the bag. And that green stretch in front of us is called a fairway.”

  And that was how my first and only golf lesson started. Catfish showed me how to tee up the ball, how to stand about two feet from the ball and bend my knees, how to make a full hip turn with my swing. At the first hole, he teed up, took a breath, exhaled, bent his knees, lifted the driver past his shoulder and swung it through to the ball in one loose but controlled motion. The golf ball flew high and straight down the fairway and for a moment I lost sight of it, and then the ball dropped to the grass, rolled forward. There was no one else around. It seemed as if the rest of the world had retreated to some raw and stormy place and we were left behind in a pocket where nothing could touch us. A sweet, grassy smell hung in the air.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  I teed up the ball. Took my stance. Bent my knees and swung. The ball dribbled off the tee. Catfish smiled some.

  “You’re all tied up in knots,” he coaxed. “Take a deep breath. Don’t try to bomb away at the ball. Just make one complete motion. Like you’re dancing alone and no one can see how happy you are.”

  I tried again. Same result. Same clumsy dancer.

  “Don’t look,” I told him.

  He turned his back to me and said, “You can do anything, Norah Bow.”

  I moved a little closer to the tee, thinking maybe I was reaching for the ball. I pictured Catfish and I at the dance pavilion. I let the tension go in my elbows and shoulders and the ball launched itself off the ground, higher than the trees and down the middle of the fairway.

  “You’re a natural.” Catfish beamed.

  We played all nine holes, unfazed by the sign that said the course was closed. As if clocks had not yet been invented. As if there was no trouble behind or ahead of either one of us. All the while, I was uncertain whether we were tramps or kings, but for those few hours the whiskey river and its underworld my father had been dragged into was held at bay. I couldn’t remember feeling the nameless dread of my past decisions. I didn’t think once about Daddy. I loved playing, but I loved being there with Catfish more. He made me laugh from my belly. If he flubbed a put, he’d turn his putter into Chaplin’s defiant cane, sometimes spinning his body around it or pointing it toward a ball as if to call the ball back to the cup. Catfish was a natural ham. He didn’t take the game seriously and he didn’t bother to keep score, but someone else did. We saw three men running toward us waving rakes and shovels. Why, I wondered, did ominous men always travel in threes? I wasn’t about to stick around and find out?

  “Guess our game is over,” Catfish said.

  “Sure was fun,” I said, searching his face for what to do next.

  “Look,” Catfish said, watching the three men draw closer. “I’ll head toward the woods. You make your way back to my boat. If I’m not there in an hour, take the ferry from the south end, back to Windsor.”

  He read my puzzled look.

  “I’m the one they want. Not you.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’ll find you there.”

  The three men were only a hundred yards away.

  “Get going,” he said.

  I ran south while Catfish ran east toward the woods. The men paused to consider our splitting up, then they forgot about me and ran after Catfish. He was slowed down by the bag of clubs over his shoulder, but still he looked fast enough to give them the dodge.

  Just before I lost sight of him, he waved and my heart leapt in my throat. I found his boat with no problem. I wanted to take a nap on the bank, but I didn’t want to risk having someone else stumble upon me. I waited for over an hour, but Catfish was a no show. I walked slowly to the ferry dock hoping he would pop up and light my path, but he never came. I bought my ferry ticket back to Windsor half wondering if I had only dreamt our time together or if it really happened. Even while I stood on the upper deck in my movie-star glasses, I thought maybe I’d see Catfish following the ferry back to Windsor, but there was no sign of his boat to unfreeze the moment of my going on alone. I stood at the rail of the Belle Isle Queen watching the wake, wanting to be like Ruby in search of a dress and a party at a roadhouse bar, and not a fourteen-year-old girl looking for her daddy who might be hidden, dead, or undiscoverable by his own lights.

  

  No, that’s not even close to the whole story about that day. I wanted to be with Catfish who didn’t care whether I wore sunglasses or not. Didn’t care if I knew a driver from an iron or if I even had a father. Didn’t care if I had a shape that favored a dress. How many years since the tilted mischief of his smile on that golf course? Eighty or is it more? After so much time, aren’t we entitled to invent what we said and did and even imagine a different outcome? So much in us tangles and collapses and even a bright, crisp memory like this one seems not to be mine alone, but to belong to the place itself set down in a river with fierce current. This memory has waited all this time to return out of hiding and now when I can hardly carry a teacup, some unsorted awakening takes hold of me like a virus or a stray enzyme in the blood, not yet finished with me, not yet started, and the long night of my sleeping is coming on fast.

  19

  I walked off the ferry thinking it was best that Catfish wasn’t there. He made me want to play and laugh and forget what I had already seen and done and what more I had to do. I had no business asking him to take risks on my behalf with the hope that getting away would be as easy as outrunning three men with rakes. Whatever I had to do there in Windsor, I had to do alone. I walked two buildings down, entered the parking lot of the Mexican Export Company and saw three Reo Speeds. One was parked so its windshield faced the river, one was backed up to a dock, and another waited to unload. There was a man in a tweed cap fielding a line for a boat. The river chopped hard against the piling. The waves were confused as if by the light cut with gray clouds. Nothing about this dock said to me, So glad you could stop by.

  I took off my sunglasses, spun around to look behind me, then slipped inside a white dockside building. I walked down a hallway patched with squares of angled window light. I found an office on my right with the air squeezed out of it. The walls were bare. The few shelves held leather-bound ledger books. On a desk, I saw Mexican Export Custom Forms marked Peru, Argentina, Trinidad, Cuba. I turned on the desk light and the room took on the tinge of green glass shade. I walked around the desk to open a metal file cabinet. I tried the drawer handle, but it was locked. Daddy kept his keys close to the places he kept locked. I felt underneath the desk, on the carpet corner, and found the key in a magnet box on the backside of the cabinet. I didn’t come this far not to snoop. I let out my air, then quickly held it again.

  I looked through a window and saw the first Reo Speed pull away. The second car, waiting to unload, backed up. I turned back to the cabinet, turned the key, and started flipping through marked folders. I saw the names of Hiram agents, engine part suppliers, dock workers, pile drivers, boat builders, carpenters, Customs agents, gas and oil purveyors, handy men but what I wanted was the names of mechanics who worked for the Mexican Export Company. Sweat trickled off my face and wet the back of my hands. I told my hands to work faster. My throat turned to sandpaper. I didn’t dare try to swallow. I saw a file marked Bermuda Exporters and read a letter from a Jimmy Longman to a Cecil Thomas talking about raising the price of beer by a dollar a case. I saw files on setting prices, guaranteed delivery schedules, the leveraging of credit, billing cycles, damage and inventory adjustments, taxes, debt collection. At the end of Longman’s letter: all business on the Detroit side will be cash-and-carry. Nobody gets a free ride.

  Another file: 10 Commandments of the Mexican Export Company.

  1. Thou shalt not use wood alcohol to cut good whiskey.

  2. Thou shalt mind thine own damn business.

  3. Thou shalt not talk to the police about anything.

  4. Thou shalt not talk to newspaper reporters.

  5. Thou shalt know nothing about river crimes.

  6. Thou shalt not steal from other rumrunners.

  7. Thou shalt not welch on debts.

  8. Thou shalt not use counterfeit cash to pay for whiskey or beer.

  9. Thou shalt not undercut another rumrunner.

  10.Thou shalt not work the river on one’s own time.

  Whoever violates these 10 rules will be sent to the coroner.

  The underlining of the word coroner made my lip quiver like maybe the investigator of violent deaths had already laid me out on a table for examination. I saw photos of boats with notation of their loaded and unloaded estimated speed. I flipped through a file marked Women. Inside, photos of naked women with phone numbers on the back. Then, tucked inside that folder, between a photo of a woman lying in a four-poster bed with her legs wrapped around a man and a photo of another woman bent over a horsehair loveseat, I found another file with the words Engine Repair scribbled on top. My fingers flew through this file, but mostly I saw only the names of shops: Jake’s Marine Engines, The Hull Truth, River Fuel, C & S Marine, Detroit Engines, Charlie Hood. Then, I found a piece of paper labeled Mechanics at the top and below, a short list of names: Clarence More, Johnny Carpenter, Charlie Benoit, Stanley LaSalle, Vital Bow. I read the last name about ten times, then I told myself I had not seen it.

  There was no mistaking that name, nor the memory that grabbed me right then out of nowhere of Daddy cornering Aunt Cora on our porch. I had just come from the can and neither one of them knew I was listening in. It was dark enough to cloak me where the porch doglegged. I heard him boasting to her how his first name meant, indispensable to the continuance of life and his last name meant a knot tied with two lovely loops. Prancing like a pony, Daddy thumbed his belt and put a slight hitch in his pants so she couldn’t overlook his most vital sign, then he backed her against the wall and kissed her hard on the mouth. I froze there, repulsed and drawn forward when she raised one leg and wrapped it around his thighs. “Is a bow anything like this?” Aunt Cora cooed. They kissed for some time, neither one able to escape the other’s grasp until I went back to the outdoor head and slammed the door. When I returned to the porch, they were gone, and I wondered if I had only imagined their locked legs or had I really seen them twined there, not twenty feet from Momma’s kitchen. Reading his name again, I wanted to tear out of me the sounds, colors, and smells of Rye Beach.

  I thumbed the folder faster looking for which docks these mechanics favored. I saw the bookkeeper’s file with a cartoon clipped to the outside. The picture showed a bottle of whiskey with a bent neck kissing a man with glasses holding a pencil. The caption read: If I didn’t love my bookkeeper so much, I’d have to drown him. I found nothing on Martina, the speedboat that Lonesome Bill spoke of, in connection with Daddy. But I did see something in the file that caught my breath. It was a photograph of Vital Bow stuck inside a file and he had his arm around a woman, and that woman was Ruby. I clenched the photo and felt my blood trickle scarlet up my neck. My eyes burned. At first I thought the floor was shaking, but it was only me. Like I’d been running hard, but I was standing still. I told myself there had to be some good explanation. And there were only two people who could give me that. I grabbed the photo out of the file. I had it half way stuck in my pocket as a man’s voice boomed.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  I turned around to see a man in a droopy, tent-like overcoat. Like other men I’d seen in Detroit, his gut hung over his belt so far it looked like he was hauling stone. He had a whiskered double-chin, dark circles below his eyes, tobacco-stained teeth, just enough hair on top not to be a snooker ball. His skin mottled orange and red like the scales of fish gone belly up. Honestly, I thought he was so fat and slow, I could dart past him, but then as if reading the flex in my legs, he pulled out a revolver.

  Swagbelly said: “I used to stand on the dock every morning and throw out a soup can. At first, I just made a lot of holes in the water. After a hundred mornings, I started to get good with this long-barreled .38.”

  “You don’t scare me,” I lied.

  “Give me time.”

  His words jabbed like hot wire.

  “Looking for my daddy,” I said.

  Swagbelly jammed his two fingers into his mouth and let out a piercing whistle. Two men from outside came running.

  “Look what I found, boys. Says she’s looking for Daddy. Ever hear that one before?”

  I recognized one of the men who’d been tending a dock line. He too wore a long coat with a nightstick dangling from his belt like he was an off-duty cop making an extra buck.

  “Tell us what you’re looking for and maybe we can help you find it,” the man said with a smirk and a dare.

  “I told you, looking for my father. His name is Vital Bow.”

  Swagbelly set his gun down on the desk, tipped his hat back, and rubbed his eyes. Then, he pressed his palms flat against his eyes like he was hoping to shut out what little light held me in his office.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Norah Bow. I’m not trying to steal anything.”

  “That paper in your pocket?”

  “I forgot to put it back.”

  ‘Shit, girl. That’s not real smart.”

  Sweat found the back of my neck. My gut tightened. Everything in me breaking and burning. I looked at the other two and wondered what Ruby would do if she were there. They looked bored like they couldn’t read the profit in conversation. They too were on the heavy side and short, and looked none too nimble in a tight space cast with poor light.

  “This photo means nothing to me,” I said to Swagbelly, flicking the picture of Ruby and my father on his desk.

  “Don’t believe you,” the big man snorted before he sat down and put his feet on his desk and lit a cigarette.

  “You don’t look like you believe much of anything.”

  “Smart mouth on you.”

  My arms prickled like they’d been dipped in hot sauce.

  “Just tell me where I can find Vital Bow and I’ll be on my way.”

  “If I tell you, then my boys here will take you on a one-way ride. If I don’t tell you, I might let you go. Then again, I might not. In this business every decision you make gives rise to the need of another decision and that’s what troubles me. I don’t like surprises because they require an unwanted decision and that action prompts the threat of a miscalculation. Can you see how your turning up here has made me feel agitated? Like maybe I should have seen someone like you coming from a long way off. A speck of something that blinds me to some bigger trouble that will require me to make another decision I don’t want to make.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow all the turns of your thinking.”

  “Then, let me speak plainly.”

  “Please, sir.”

  “I’m a hammer and you’re a fucking nail.”

  No matter the ten commandments these men swore by, I figured Swagbelly was bluffing. My mind threw sparks in all directions, looking for some crack to slip through. I couldn’t hurt him. Swagbelly ran an export business. I didn’t run anything and I didn’t know anybody. Nobody in Windsor or Detroit would believe anything I might say about him. I didn’t even know Swagbelly’s real name.

  “I’ll take my chances with knowing my father’s whereabouts,” I said through parched lips.

  “You got moxie, girl, but you’ve got mush for brains for coming in here.”

  “My father worked on a boat called Martina.”

  Swagbelly picked up the photo, glanced at it, threw it down on the floor.

  “Don’t know anything about the Martina.”

  “Vital Bow. What do you know about my father?”

  Swagbelly scratched his left ear, then his nose. Like he was trying to remember something through the skid of a fingernail.

  “Last I heard, Vital Bow was on Middle Island. He services the fancy speedboats from Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, all over.”

  “Middle Island? There’s nothing there.”

  “Nothing but a high-class casino and plenty of girls and booze.”

  “I sailed right by him?”

  “The photo you lifted should tell you he’s feeling no pain.”

  “Let me walk out of here,” I said, fiercely. “I’ve done you no harm.”

  “You cut yourself a low card.”

  “I’m meeting somebody tonight. If I’m not there, they’ll know I’m missing. They will come looking for me and for you.”

 

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