The Watery Part of the World Read Free

everything. Miss Whaley liked to call out the prices at night. “They got turkey breast twenty-nine cents a pound! Look at these chairs, I wouldn’t have one of them in my shed and they’re wanting thirty dollars a piece, not a pair, I wouldn’t own one myself.”
    All it took to make Woodrow wonder how come he stayed around after Wilma was to sit around on the church steps long enough to hear Whaley say such things three times a night about a two-week-old manager’s special one hundred miles away up in Norfolk.
    But most of the time he’d never wonder how come he stayed. He’d never go lusting after some spinning ball, dancing up under it, imagining how such a ball, lit by special bulbs, would glitter diamonds all up and down your partner. He’d never get lost in a vision of him twirling sweet Sarah in a waterspout of diamondsbecause evenings he’d sit on his porch and stare out across the marsh to where night came rolling blue-black and final over the sound and he’d say no thank you to some ball, we got stars.
    Not long after Crawl wrote about his club—couple weeks Woodrow reckoned—he showed up on the island. Had three of his boys with him. Woodrow hadn’t seen him in a while. Crawl was wearing his hair springy long and had on wide-legged pants made out of looked like cardboard and zip-up ankle boots. Woodrow picked up the littlest of the grandbabies, knee baby also named Woodrow, had some dried salt around his eyes from where the crossing had beat tears out of him. Woodrow wiped away the salt and some snot with a rag, then took the boy inside and scrubbed at his face, trying to be Sarah and Woodrow all at once, pushing food on the boys, some three-day-old bread with butter which they carried around in their hands like they didn’t know what to do with food not bought off a shelf in a store.
    Everything was different now with Sarah gone. Nothing was easy.
    Crawl sent the boys down to poke around the empty houses waiting on their owners to come back, sitting up on brickbat haunches like a dog will do you when you go off for a while. Woodrow and Crawl sat on the porch and Crawl pulled out a pint of Canadian.
    Smooth as liver, he claimed. “Have a drink, Daddy.”
    Woodrow took a pull though he favored a High Life. Crawl talked on about his club. Night Life was what he was calling it. He had some pictures of it. To Woodrow the club wasn’t muchfrom the outside: cinder-block hut, oystershell parking lot, big old ditch out in front for drunks to get their ride stuck in. He showed some pictures of the inside that was dark and red and Woodrow said, “Un-hunh, okay, all right, I see, that’s nice.” Seemed like he made sounds, not words. He’d look up from the pictures wanting his grandbabies to come back. He wanted to take them down to the inlet and let them jerk crabs out of the sound on a chicken liver tied to a string, but when finally he mentioned going after them Crawl said, “Naw, we got to get back across.”
    â€œY’all can’t stay through? Plenty of room for all y’all.”
    Crawl reached down, tugged at his boot zipper. To Woodrow, boots ought not to come with a zipper, but it was Crawl’s feet, he could cover them however he wanted.
    Crawl said, “I reckon those boys used to electricity.” Then he added, all of a sudden loud, “Besides, we didn’t come over here to stay, we came over here to get you to come back with us.”
    Woodrow couldn’t see himself going anywhere with duded-up Crawl. He smiled and asked after Crawl’s wife’s people who he used to know a little when he lived in Morehead, where if you asked him everybody put too much notion into how long and wide and clean was the car somebody drove around town.
    â€œEverybody’s doing fine,” said Crawl. “But me and Violet and the boys, we worry about you over here all alone now.”
    When Woodrow said