lumbered into the shore, barreling against the pylon walls, which swayed and creaked under the pressure but always managed to bounce the boat to the opposite wall like a pinball, back and forth as she shimmied her way into the slip and the ferrymen secured her to the dock.
Chip Gruder was captaining that morning, and a younger guy whom Roddy didn’t know personally, named Derrick Darlington, was working the dock, directing cars. He swung open a wide chain-link gate and stepped out of the line of traffic as he motioned the first car off the boat, up the ramp, and onto dry land. It was a full ferry, twelve cars or so, engines turning over, drivers refastening seat belts, passengers preparing to disembark. Roddy stood by the ticket shack as the cars filed off and Derrick turned to the line of cars behind him, started motioning them onto the boat. Matty Lux was at the bow, guiding drivers into place, getting them squeezed in tight; it was a puzzle, packing on as many cars as the ferry could hold. Roddy waited until all the vehicles were on before he boarded with a few other foot passengers—two guys with lunch pails and a man in a business suit—who’d come up behind him, as well as two teenage girls who emerged from the ticket shack in waitress uniforms, clearly heading over to work the breakfast shift at Baldy’s in Menhadenport. Derrick Darlington stopped each of the pedestrians, exchanged brief words, and punched tickets for them from the thick rolled pad in his gloved hands. When Roddy got to him, Derrick said, “One way, round trip?”
“One way, on foot.”
Derrick lifted his eyes from the ticket book. “You picking up the Lodge truck?”
Roddy nodded.
Derrick flexed the hole-puncher in his grip as if it was cramping his hand. “Trouble with the staff again?” He spoke like a jaded disciplinarian, though he could not have been more than nineteen himself and had the remnants of a nasty-looking black eye on his suntanned face.
Roddy shrugged.
“You know who did it?” the kid said. “Who left the truck?”
Roddy just stood there looking at him. “Yeah,” he said curtly. And then he clamped his jaw shut and stepped onto the boat. His fare would go on the Lodge account.
The water was choppy, waves reflecting sunlight like undulating glass, and the ferry rocked and sloshed in the slip, bucking up against the pylons, which creaked and groaned in response. These were, for Roddy Jacobs, the most familiar sights and sounds in the world. Just the smells of this place—the fishy seaweed rot, the salt-drenched, sun-baked wood, gasoline, engine exhaust—all whipped by the wind and sprayed from the water in a fine mist as the ferry pulled away from the dock. Roddy leaned against the railing and turned his face to the sky, eyes closed against the sun. He heard the honking call of the ferry whistle, the churn of the rudders beneath him, the push of water through the gunwales, the clanking of chains on the gate, and the constant arrhythmic clang of rope against metal as halyard smacked flagpole atop the captain’s tower.
If there were other places like this in the world, Roddy Jacobs hadn’t found them. And he’d traveled plenty. Two decades, and travel was mostly what he’d done. He’d been up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, through Canada, and down to Mexico and below. He’d even ridden ferries—every ferry he could find—all over Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands, across Lake Michigan and Lake Champlain and through the locks of Sault Sainte Marie. He’d been to Cape Cod, and Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and St. Simon’s. Block Island, Shelter Island, Staten Island, Fire Island. And all of them were nice—he was sure that the people who’d grown up in Vineyard Haven and Vinalhaven cherished their ferries the way he cherished Osprey’s and thought their island the most beautiful, most breathtaking, most comforting place in the world. He was glad for those people who had their places. Because he had his. Roddy Jacobs had longed for his home every day he’d spent elsewhere. It was only on returning that he fully realized—a gulp of ocean air pounding into his lungs as though he hadn’t really breathed for twenty years—how much will it had taken to keep himself away.
He knew very well who’d left the truck illegally parked in Menhadenport, though he was finding it hard to get his mind to focus on what that really meant.