Coasters. Gerald Duff

from one person to the next.

      There were four, a woman and three men. One of the men was obviously the charter boat captain, his baseball cap faded by the sun to a mottled blue, his forearms the shade of saddle leather, and his footwear a Wal-Mart version of running shoes. He was holding two cardboard boxes of frozen squid under his left arm and a sack of ice in his right hand, and he was listening with his head bowed to one of the other men.

      The one speaking was wearing a long-billed cap, he had a dab of white sun screen centered on the bridge of his nose, and his boat shoes looked like they had been purchased in the last month in an outfitters store in a mall somewhere.

      The woman, whose she was Waylon couldn’t tell yet, was leaning over the transom of the Gulf Princess and staring into the live well. The way she was standing caused the back of her T-shirt to ride up from the waistband of her pants and revealed about two inches of skin the same pecan-shell hue as that of her arms and what Waylon could see of the side of her face, as she watched the shiners dart back and forth in the bait well. She stuck in one finger and swished it around and increased her lean enough to show another inch or two of skin. Still no tan line.

      “What kind’s this one, Teddy?” she said and turned to look toward the third man, who stood nearest her steadily rubbing sun screen squeezed from what looked like a plastic banana into the back of his neck. “The one with the blue stripes.”

      When Teddy stepped forward to join the woman at the bait well, Waylon could see that the sun screen container was in fact a plastic banana suspended from a matching yellow string.

      “That one there,” Teddy said, “is what’s known as a blue-striped fish. The small-mouth variety.”

      “Right,” the woman said, straightening up to face Teddy. As she did, she noticed Waylon and nodded in his direction. “And I guess this boat’s what’s known technically as a fishing boat.”

      “Ask Leo,” Teddy said, turning his attention again to the banana and squeezing more lotion onto his finger tips. “He’ll tell you a name.”

      “I know that,” the woman said. “But he’s busy talking some talk right now.” She looked at Waylon again, this time for a longer spell.

      “Do you know?” she asked. “What kind it is?”

      “The boat?” Waylon said, putting on a smile and moving a step or two closer. “Or the bait fish?”

      “The fish,” the woman said. “The blue-striped one.”

      “I haven’t looked at it,” Waylon said, “but I’d guess a shiner or a small shad.”

      “See there, Teddy,” the woman said. “Everything’s got its own name. Mine is Marsue. He’s Teddy.”

      “I’m Waylon,” Waylon said. “Waylon McPhee. Y’all are from Beaumont, right?”

      About then, the man in the long-billed cap turned to look toward the others, the expression on his face that of a man who had just learned that the insurance payment hadn’t arrived in time or that the fourth-down try was inches short and the Oilers drive was over on the three-yard line and the point spread was again not beaten.

      “They don’t take plastic,” he answered to all who might be attending, “and Captain Metcalf says he needs at least two hundred dollars in cash to take us out on the water. How much you got on you, Teddy?”

      Teddy let his banana drop to swing freely by its string around his neck and reached for his wallet, and Marsue looked silently at Leo for a space before moving back to peer into the bait well at the shiners.

      Between them, Teddy and Leo came up with a hundred and sixty-five dollars cash, and Leo gathered it all into one hand and fixed Captain Metcalf with a pleading look. “What do you think, Captain?” he said. “Can you see your way clear for just under two hundred?”

      “I’d love to, gentlemen,” the captain said, including Waylon in his explanation as he looked from face to face. “But for a half-day, I’d just barely break even for that amount. I got to have a little to show for my work. You know, bait, ice, fuel, time.”

      Everybody stood silent for a minute, listening to the throb of the inboard on the Gulf Princess and the purr of the air pump in the bait well. Teddy stared at his banana, Leo looked at the money in his hand, and Marsue dabbled her fingers in the water where the bait fish splashed.

      “I could come up with the extra thirty-five bucks and go with you,” Waylon said, “if somebody’s got a spare hat they could lend me to keep the sun off.”

      “That’s the time,” Leo said, cramming the money back in his pocket and extending a hand toward Waylon. “The name’s Leo Butler, and Marsue’s got two or three extra caps with her, I know.”

      Ten minutes later, with everybody aboard and with Waylon wearing a hot-pink cap that said Live the Dream just above the bill, Captain Metcalf pointed the bow of the Gulf Princess toward the channel markers leading to the mouth of Sabine Pass Bay and the open water beyond.

      Near its zenith, the sun hammered the Gulf and everything moving on it, and by the time the captain had taken the boat a few miles from shore everybody in the fishing party had stopped trying to talk over the roar of the inboard engine and had found places to sit and wait for some stopping point to be reached.

      Leo Butler was perched in front on the seat next to the captain’s, his long-billed cap pushed back on his head so he could lean forward to observe the dials on the control panel, and Teddy and Marsue sat side by side on an upholstered pad on the engine housing facing the rear of the boat. Marsue had taken her shoes off, and from where he sat in a plastic lawn chair, Waylon could finally see where the tan ended on her body.

      It stopped with an oval on the top of each foot, fading into white just before the bones of her toes began to show their articulation. Evidently, the woman didn’t wear sandals often, but in Waylon’s opinion that fact hadn’t held her back much. He could imagine himself leaving his plastic chair, crawling across the four or five feet of deck space between them, and leaning forward to kiss each toe there toasting in the sun.

      Instead he closed his eyes against the glare and listened to the rhythmic throb of the engine and the regular pattern of the bow of the boat pounding over the line of waves it met in its progress. His body moved in cadence with the motion, and the steady up and down, the to and fro, the backwards and forwards, put him in mind of the roller coaster at Pleasure Island, the amusement park in Port Arthur where he had spent four summers of his teenage years.

      The entrance to the ride stood across from the Round Stand where he had sold hot dogs and soft drinks and ice cream in the employ of his mother’s brother, the only relation of his family on both sides who was ever in a position to make any money. All of his kin considered Uncle Runky rich, especially the East Texas branch, and Waylon never had any reason to doubt the truth of the belief.

      Certainly, his famous Uncle Runky was tyrant enough to convince anybody of his wealth, working the employees of his food concessions at the park long enough hours at low enough wages to prove his business savvy to any potential doubter of his financial success. His workers all hated and feared him and stole food from both the snack stand and the restaurant every chance they got.

      Between waiting on customers at the Round Stand, the hot dog stuffers and the Coke guzzlers and ice cream crammers over from the mainland, Waylon would lift his eyes to read the great sign above the entrance to the ride across the way. “Ride the Coaster,” it proclaimed in large red letters against a white background, “Thrill of a Lifetime,” the word Thrill the largest of the command and the others trailing off, each smaller than the one before until time, the smallest of all, vanished with the final tiny letter e.

      And Waylon did, each chance he got, when the crowd in the park was small or when he was on a lunch or supper break or when the maintenance crew was testing the track those few hours each summer week Pleasure Island was closed to customers. The ride was free for him, one of the few fringe benefits to park employees, and Waylon took full advantage of every opportunity to slip