This Time by Don Robishaw

Five AM

    Thirty days removed from the bar life: There are things I can’t erase. One drink is enough to destroy what I’ve accomplished over the past month. Today, I live clean for the kids. They’re the ones that urged me to stop.

    My lifelong friend Roger and I have a mutual goal. A bigger boat and we can expand our legal lobster operation.

    Down by the beach, Roger, ex-con and occasional motorcycle mechanic hovers over ‘Scorpion’ as he towels off his tattooed chest and salt and pepper beard. Two bald Harley Davidson Sportster tires sink in white sand.

    Roger Feeny lives free, for the beauty of the sea, changing tides with hues from blues to greens, and the steady ripple of ocean waves. Sometimes seas are tranquil — smooth as aged whiskey. Other times, the current’s combatively angry, like on those cold wintery evenings Roger spent in sick-bay. Things were looking up, at the time. He would soon be discharged and able to rejoin his shipmates. . .  Although, their screams eventually ceased, the memories of his lost mates entombed on a sub in a hole on the bottom of the ocean still haunt him.

Six AM

    Dark clouds gather overhead. Today, Roger and I paint pleasure craft bottoms at Shell Marina and other marinas along Rhode Island and Massachusetts southern shores. We sand hulls down to the primer with a heavy-duty disc-grinder. Googles and closed mouths required.      Jack-of-all-trades, we expect to be paid a lot. ‘cause nobody else wants to do it. 

    People want boats in the water now, and we want to increase our savings account in order to buy a bigger lobster boat with a new engine. We have picked it out already. We need money right away. A more reliable and bigger one produces more income. More income and my ex is happy, and I get the kids more often. Everybody’s happy.

    Rains come before we can apply the primer. We don’t get paid until the job is finished. Damn it. We secure a blue tarpaulin to the hull. Press trigger-finger against left nostril and blow. 

    I yank the driver’s side door three times before it loosens, reach under the passenger seat for an empty Bud can that’s been rolling around for ages, and toss it left-handed into a dark-green dumpster from twenty-feet away. Hook shoot. Two points. Still got it. Back in high school days, starting forward for the Blue Waves before they expelled me from school for drinking too often on campus.

    We get in my faded ’59 gold Bonneville and head towards Quahog Point, a well-known area for lovers and for digging the hard shell clams by hand. High tide — Seas are too rough today. Steady lightning flashes. I come here to park, cry, and think about my ex and the kids. She and I have been lost to each other for two years. You fucked up too many times, Danny boy. My name is mud to her. But, just maybe. . . No matter what, the kids are everything to me.

    On the drive up Beach Road I space out over the massive Newport Bridge, we built in ’68, whistling along to Otis Redding’s ‘Sitting on the Dock of the Bay’ playing on my eight-track. Remembering now, how the money used to pour in, back in the day. “Wanna set our lobster traps? Got the engine running on the old boat.” Engine still knocking, though. I raise my thumb, “Good rates now.” 

    “Gotta lay low, Dan.” Roger rubs his black eye. “Guys looking for me. They think I stole their traps. Might be facing more than an ass-kicking.”

    “How they got these ideas I’ll never know. Did you do it, Rog?”

    “Fuck no. Remember when my ex-brother-in-law did that shit?”

    “Shave your beard, and people won’t get you mixed up. What happened to your eye?”

    “The Clayton brothers, last night. One-on-one I can handle them.”

    “Charlie Clayton was my point guard on the Blue Waves. We got thrown off the team, but he didn’t get expelled. I took the heat. Let me talk to him.”

    “Thanks Dan.”

    “I’ll need a ten-spot to buy him a dime bag.”

    “Okay.”

    “That’ll get me in the door.”

    Roger laughs, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, right.”

    Rog and I have been struggling to stay straight for a lot more than thirty days. We 

power-shake to reinforce our commitment to stop petty crimes and drinking. “Hard to fathom you were a jail-bird. Eleven months. For what? An ounce of weed.”

    Honorable discharge didn’t mean shit to the judge.” Roger wrinkles his brow and lowers his voice, “and don’t call me a fuckin’ jail bird, either.”

    “Sorry, bro.” I say, “Southern New England Shucking Company is hiring. One of the last houses still shucking those huge sea clams by hand.”

    Roger rolls his eyes. “How much can it suck?”

    “We ain’t gonna make a career out of it, mate. We’re both lefties.”

    “Let’s give it a go. What do we have to lose?”

    “Yesterday the judge said, ‘Daniel Ryan, if you want to see your kids again keep your nose clean and keep up the child support.’ Therefore, I have a lot to lose.” WTF, I can’t work for peanuts.

    “That little Danny of yours is a real hot shit, bro.”

    I smile to hold back tears from behind my dark aviators.

Seven AM: Two Aging Pretty Boys

    Five miles from the point: A white shingle triple-decker stretches to the rear porch on the wharf, dwarfing us. Inside, middle-aged-women stand at stainless steel tables. After a tour, they teach us the ‘right-handed’ system. A tobacco-brunette reaches from behind, brushes up real close, and teaches me how to hold the blade. She guides my knife-hand, making incisions into the muscle to get clams to open-up. Next, we slide the knife around the edge, scoop and drop the meat into a white plastic bucket. 

    She smiles. “You can call me Marina of the Sea,” and squeezes me with forearms that would make Popeye look more like Olive Oyl. 

    Sun breaks and it’s going to hit a hundred. Air conditioner’s broke and no breeze. Heat, sweat, and salt-water upon my face and arms in the morning. Inhale . . . Exhale. . . I’d love to have my first cold one about now. Love to have a drink with Roger. Stop shaking damn-it. I’m half the man I coulda been, if only. . .

    Country music blasts from a transistor AM/FM radio. I shake out my shoulder length thinning dirty blonde hair, tie it into a ponytail, and get to work. 

    And the pay? Former card-carrying union iron workers don’t expect the minimum wage of a dollar-forty an hour. Fuck peace work. Best we do is seventy-five cents. Top shuckers average six bucks.

    We go to the boss-man. First, get rid of our sweaty t-shirts, and then enter the office, if that’s what you call it. Forty years old and not an ounce of fat on me. “Sorry, we’re done.” Politely I add, “We want our pay.”

    A  kindly looking overweight man from behind a messy old wooden desk says, “Keep on shucking,” With a smirk on his face adds, “you’ll get better.”

    “Something wrong with you ears, mate?”

    Shaking, he stares at the menacing looking blade on my belt and pulls out the cashbox. We’re not in the mood to take his shit and demand minimum wage.

    We say, “Have a nice day, mate!” Wish there was a way money could go directly into a bank account without touching my itchy fingers.                                Four PM: A Final Barrier

    Pockets jingling, we stare at our reflections in the plate-glass window of ‘The Lonely Clam.’ I turn towards Roger. “That shucking place was enough to drive one to drink.”

    The green-screen-door swings open with creak to a fifty-foot mahogany bar hiding in a darkened room. Cigarette-filled ashtrays, overhead fans, and several white life-rings line the four bulkheads. Men-of-the-sea stand, one foot on a brass rail. Broad-shouldered women-of-the-sea slump on stools with elbows on the bar. Nothing like the whiff of real drinking men or women, that stench of sweat and beer and whiskey-laden breaths.

    Something can be said of men and women who know that stench of failure, lost opportunities . . . a ring in a card game, that unused basketball scholarship or GI Education Bill. Nothing like the sweet smell of resignation, of not expecting much from a disappointing life. 

    Something can be said of men and women who go through life with few goals other than where’s the next beer coming from? When am I getting laid?

Four Thirty PM: This Time

    There are things I can’t erase. Thirty days removed from the bar life, and I breakdown in front of my friend. “One drink, Rog.” Tears roll out from under my aviators. “I promise to go back on the wagon tomorrow.”

    “Up to you. I can dig how much you love your kids, man. There’s an AA meeting at Saint Michael’s. Free buffet.”

    A month dry. Roger and I are on pace to meet our goal. If we’re serious about the new boat, five restaurants are willing to buy all our lobsters. Finish two more bottoms and we can expand our operation.

    So, I stare through the plate-glass widow, walk away, this time, taking each day as it comes. Forecast tomorrow: Blue skies overhead.

    

    

Don Robishaw’s collection of five FF tales found in, ‘Bad Road Ahead’ was the Grand Winner in Defenestrationism, 2020 Flash Fiction Suite Contest.

Don’s short story entitled,’Bad Paper Odyssey’ was a semi-finalist in Digging Through the Fat 2018 Chapbook Contest.

His work has also recently appeared in The Rye Whiskey Review, Drunk Monkeys, Literary Orphans, Crack-the-Spine, FFM, O’ Dark Thirty, among other venues.

Many of the characters he developed have been homeless, served for periods of time in the military, or are based upon archetypes or stereotypes he's met while on the road. He likes to write poetry, satire, tragedies, and gritty fictional tales — of men and women from various backgrounds — that may have sprouted from a seed, from his past.

Before he stopped working to write he ran educational programs for homeless shelters. Don's also well-traveled, using various ways and means: Sailor, Peace Corps Volunteer, bartender, hitchhiker, world traveler, college professor, and circus roustabout.