Summer in the Land of Skin. Jody Gehrman

now, too. Then all at once, the girl cries, “What are you looking at, bitch?” and the car behind me starts honking.

      I shake myself from the trance and pull my foot off the brake, put it back on the gas. From my radio, Johnny Cash sings, Drive on, don’t mean nothin’, drive on.

      It takes me a good two hours to find Elliot Bender. Aunt Rosie wasn’t able to dig up his phone number, so he has no idea I’m coming, and all I have is a Post-it with a barely legible address scribbled on it. What I find there is a startled woman in a terry-cloth sweatsuit and a couple of astonishingly fat kids. It’s a rundown cabin near the train tracks. A greasy yellow dog with brown teeth strains from the end of a chain and barks so loudly my head throbs. When I ask if she knows who lived there before, she nods and squints up at the sky.

      “Weird fellow,” she says. “We used to drink together, back when I lived in that little shit hole over there.” She points her chin at a trailer across the way. “Heard he moved onto a boat.”

      “A boat?” I echo.

      “Down at the marina,” she says. “Out by that stinky old mill. I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.”

      I’ve never known anyone who lives on a boat, but I’ve always been fascinated by pirates, so I’m a little titillated. After a half-hour spent asking around down by the docks, I’m finally able to locate his slip. When I see the size of it—no more than thirty-five feet, bow to stern—I realize that my half-baked assumption that this guy could put me up for a while is out of the question. No guest rooms here.

      There’s a locked gate separating the boat owners from the world at large, and I’m standing behind it, my fingers laced in the wire diamonds, staring at the two lines of sailboats knocking quietly against the docks. The guy at the office told me to look for slip number thirteen. I hadn’t anticipated the problem of how to announce myself, when there’s no real door to knock on. As I’m standing there, staring at Elliot Bender’s boat, a mounting shyness nearly turns me back around. I reach into my pocket and feel for Shiva, finger the comforting lines of the wood, warmed by my body.

      “You looking for somebody?”

      I jump a little, then locate a very small man sanding the bow of a sailboat. He’s not even four feet tall, with disproportionately long arms and a pink, bearded face.

      “Elliot—um—Elliot Bender?” I stammer.

      Before I know what’s happening, he’s hollering in an unnaturally loud voice, “Bender!” He looks at me, rolls his eyes, and mutters, “Lazy bastard,” then resumes with even more volume, “BENDER!” We both watch the rundown old boat intently, but nothing happens. Gentle waves swish against the docks, while a seagull screeches disapprovingly. The little guy goes back to sanding. “Who are you, anyway?”

      I stand there, trying to find the right answer. I grip Shiva tighter in my pocket, and I can feel the wood sliding against the wet of my palm.

      Just then, a head appears from below deck. It is turned away from me, and all I can see is a wild mess of dark gray hair.

      “What do you want, Stumpy?” Stumpy gestures in my direction, and the head turns abruptly toward me. As he rises from the hole, there’s a flash of blue eyes, a face grown silver with stubble, and a great swell of belly beneath a grease-stained undershirt. He freezes, visible only from the waist up, and something tells me he’s not decent from the waist down.

      “Yeah?” he says to me, blinking in the sunlight.

      “Are you Elliot Bender?” I force my voice into a deceptive evenness.

      “Who wants to know?”

      “I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute. Is this a bad time?”

      “Look, I paid that dentist bill, if that’s what you’re after—”

      I smile. “No,” I say. “It’s nothing like that.”

      “What, the phone?”

      I shake my head.

      He sighs, starts patting at his mess of hair, stroking it into submission like it’s an animal that must be tamed. “Do I know you?” he says, his tone still wary.

      “Sort of,” I say. “I’m Anna Medina.”

      He stares at me. I watch as his Adam’s apple bobs once in a hard swallow.

      “Just a minute,” he says finally, and disappears down below.

      Stumpy climbs over onto the dock and opens the gate for me. “Man doesn’t know how to treat a lady,” he says, winking.

      I thank him, then stand there awkwardly, waiting for Elliot Bender to reappear. I am still exhausted from the hours of driving, and feel ill-equipped to deal with this unexpected turn of events. I imagined my father’s partner as a quaint, pipe-smoking man, with an immaculate, spacious studio filled with the finest guitars, smelling of lacquer, spruce and rosewood. Here I am, with a midget sailor and an overweight, half-naked man who thinks I’m trying to collect on a dentist bill.

      “Climb on board,” he says, having reappeared in a pair of ragged corduroys and a flannel shirt whose buttons don’t match up, holding a can of Budweiser.

      I carefully make my way onto the boat; it is old, plagued with layers of peeling paint, and as I get a better look I see it is cluttered with beer cans, crumpled newspaper, piles of tangled rope gone black with grease.

      He sees me looking around and shrugs. “Home sweet home,” he says, his voice flat.

      His free hand floats again to his hair, patting it down. I see he has attempted to slick it down on top, though rather unsuccessfully; it is now matted and greasy in places but springs rebelliously to life everywhere else. I look around for a place to sit, find none. He sees this, sets his beer down and scurries below deck, then emerges with a lawn chair in one hand and a bucket in the other. He flips the lawn chair open and sets it down, nodding at it in invitation, then sets the bucket upside down and sits on it, reclaiming his beer and taking a long swig.

      “You take the chair,” I say.

      “Never,” he says. “Go on, sit.”

      I do as I’m told, though the sight of him balancing on that bucket is dangerously comic, and I’m afraid I might laugh, I’m so giddy with nerves and lack of sleep.

      “Offer the lady a drink!” Stumpy yells from across the dock.

      “Hey,” Bender says over his shoulder. “Mind your own damn business!”

      He smiles a little, sheepishly, and for a second I catch a glimpse of the handsome young man he must have been, with the square jaw and heavy brow of a young Marlon Brando. The sunlight glints on his eyes; they are the brightest blue I’ve ever seen.

      “You want a beer? You old enough to drink?”

      “I am,” I say, sounding prim in spite of myself. “But no thank you.”

      He lets his eyes rest on my face for an unnaturally long pause. I touch the back of my head, feeling the foreign shortness of the hair there, and start to blush.

      “Yep,” he says, softly. “You’re Medina’s kid, all right.”

      “What makes you say that?” I say, smiling at my shoes.

      “That smile,” he says. “Your mouth’s got Medina all over it.”

      I look up and see him feeling for the button of his shirt at the place where his belly is biggest, making sure it’s still fastened. I realize it must be very hard for him to find shirts that fit, and for a second I feel sorry for him. He looks back at me intently, and I find myself staring shyly at my shoes again. He drinks from his beer, a long hard swig, then he crushes the can beneath his foot and tosses it near the bow, where it settles with a tinny clang amidst a pile of others.

      “You sure you don’t want a beer?” he says, getting up