Epoxy
Roger held out his glove. “Did you know they kept their dogs on your boat?”
“Yeah. But, the old guy said he cleaned the boat up before I took possession. How can you tell?”
He opened his glove. “Aww Gawd! I’m going to have to watch a horror movie to get that memory out of my mind!”
When I was a young man, I was hired as an apprentice for the Canadian National Railway. But I had to wait some months until a spot became available in apprenticeship school. The railway solved this employee conveyor problem by having us apprentices do menial jobs until a slot in the trade school opened up. My temporary job was cleaning the floors and bathrooms of the arriving passenger trains. Cleaning up after train loads of people, who had been cooped up in railway cars for days while the train waddled through the Canadian backwoods, was the filthiest job I’ve ever had.
When I bought Someday, its interior was so grubby that even though I’ve had plenty of experience in filth, the day after I looked inside, I hired Roger. Tall, lanky Roger hadn’t had a paying job in nine months, until I hired him. He was depending on the generosity of the church and was one step away from living under a bridge.
Every day, with a bottle of bleach in one hand, paper towels and a scraper in the other, Roger lowered his sorry ass into my boat and cleaned.
Roger was as sweet a person as you would like to meet. But, he was about as sharp as a fog bank. One day while I was on my hands and knees on the deck, I looked north towards Cape Canaveral. I wanted to see if I could catch the condensation trail from this morning’s NASA rocket. Roger caught my gaze and looked north.
I turned to him.
“I don’t know why NASA is spending all that money on the International Space Station. If they are going to spend any money, they should spend it on a permanent base on the moon.”
“The moon?” Roger said, following my eyes to the heavens. “I thought we were booted off there.”
Unlike Ernie and me, Roger never drank. One late afternoon, our day finished, Ernie, Roger and I sat in the growing shade of Someday, and in the fine tradition of buccaneers on a hot day, we drank rum. Roger sipped his Coke, whereas Ernie and I slugged back our Coke mixed 50/50 with concentrated rum.
Ernie and I had long since decided that; this was the Caribbean, we were working on a boat, who were we to insult the memory of thousands of rum-guzzling pirates? After much low and slow conversation as befitted the brutal heat, Ernie turned to us.
“When I was checking out your bilge today, your boat talked to me.”
I studied Ernie’s face, to see if I had really heard what I had heard. I looked over at Roger to see if he had caught this exchange. Roger smiled angelically at Ernie, his head slowly nodding.
“And?” I said, waiting.
“It was thanking us for bringing it back to life.”
Roger, his eyes now glowing, continued to nod. Their faces shone with the glow of kindergarten children who had just been told a happy story about cuddly teddy bears.
“Aw, shit.’ I held my hands over my eyes. ‘I’m all alone here.”
Roger held up his Coke can in salute. Shrugging, I followed his hand. Our plastic mugs clunked in a salute to the conversation Ernie just had with my boat.
“I guess Someday talks now.”
Both Roger and Ernie nodded solemnly. Roger leaned back and studied me.
“You know you aren’t the first writer I’ve met. Back home, this other writer said he wanted to write a book about me.”
Ernie and I leaned toward Roger.
“That writer? He was going to call the book Twelve Rings.”
Ernie and I studied Roger’s face.
“Because I asked twelve women to marry me, and I gave each of them rings.”
Ernie and I glanced at each other, again, then back at Roger, again.
“They all said no.”
I think that was just about the biggest gulp of rum I have ever swallowed.
When I first met Roger living at the church, he was so desperate for money that when I counted out the bills for his first week’s work, he cried. At the end of the month, when he realized that he was facing yet another seven days with his nose in Someday’s bilge, he went out and got a real job. That new job? It was the maintenance man at a stripper bar.
“He’s going to have to buy more rings.”
Ernie and I clinked our plastic glasses.
Between Roger and myself, it took a full month of scouring and scraping the insides of Someday before I was able to spend a night, asleep inside, without my skin crawling. While Roger was scraping the interior of Someday, Jose from Guatemala was sanding and re-painting her hull.
There used to be four Jose’s in the boatyard, but after a visit from the black uniformed Immigration Agents, it was discovered that three of the four Jose’s had the same Social Security Number.
This Jose had all the proper certificates, had all the equipment, and would do a much better job painting the hull than I would. Besides, having the hull’s paint applied by a certified boatyard employee was the law.
The Florida State Law says that only certified boatyards can do all the sanding and applying of the anti-fouling paint. Boatyards also must spread plastic sheets under the boat to catch the toxic droppings.
“Better you than me.” I said to Jose, whose white paper coveralls and respirator were covered in lead-based paint drippings from the hulls of several boats. While Jose sanded the paint off the hull, I got busy topside.
“Bubbles in the epoxy? We don’t need no steenking bubbles!” I shouted. Unfortunately, my impression of Alfonso Bedoya in the movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, was lost on Roger and Jose. Roger because he couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, and Jose because he could.
John, the young owner of the boatyard, stood and watched me work.
“It looks like when your mast was laid down it hammered your railing pretty good.”
“It does. They should have made a crutch to hold the mast and boom. Would have kept it off the railing.” I agreed.
“There’s an old railing on one of those boats out back. It’s still in good shape. Take a look.”
“Sure! How much?”
“Ah, $40.00?”
“John, you’re a sweetheart! I love this yard!”
The next day, after I had retrieved the newer railing from one of the abandoned boats in the mangroves, I stood and looked up at Someday’s aft. Jose stood behind me.
I spoke, almost to myself.
“I need to fiberglass the whole stern deck. But, before that, I need brass screws. But, before that, I need the boards on the stern. But, before that, I need more epoxy. But, before that, I need thickening bubbles. ‘For want of a nail….’
Jose smiled and nodded.
“Si.”
“Jose?”
“Si?”
“I think you know a whole lot more English than you let on.”
Jose smiled a white-toothed smile.
The next day, I went down to Coco Plum Beach and got a pail of clean, dog-shit-free sand for the decks. I epoxied both the port and starboard decks. While I was doing that, I noticed an awful lot of epoxy was disappearing. It was oozing through the deck via nicks and holes. I grabbed a hunk of dead grass from under the boat and jammed the ball of grass into the biggest of the holes. Not high tech, but it did the job.
I turned and nodded to John who had walked past Someday and was standing, watching me, Jose and Roger work.
“You know, when you are working on a boat, it’s always best to work on the highest job first, and then work down.”
“Okay I’ll bite, why do you start from the top?”
“Because you don’t want to drip epoxy on something you just did.”
“Oh.”
Later, I added more epoxy to the rudder. There was epoxy everywhere. The epoxy lumps were so big on that rudder I gave them names. They were getting so large that Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guides were setting up a base camp. I decided maybe I should sand down some of those lumps.
I stood back admiring the deep blue of Someday’s recently painted blue hull, that Jose had done, when John again walked past.
“Looks good.” John complimented. “You taking it back north soon?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Oh.” John said. ‘Oh’ can mean a lot of things.
“Why?” I stared at John.
“Not too many people paint their boats a dark blue color in the tropics.”
I stared at John, then glanced up at the sun. We both grinned and I shrugged.
“Looks good anyway.” John said as he walked away.
I went back after supper, in the red orange Keys sunset, to finish repairing the hole with that grass plug sticking rigidly up from the deck. Rather than start right away, I sat on that old plastic lawn chair that had become my paint spattered throne. The yard was quiet. All the tradesmen had left and most of the live-aboards were nestling in for the evening.
I looked around at the boatyard, the other boats, the sky. It dawned on me. I had been in the Keys almost the entire winter. I had buried myself in this boat for almost six months. With the weather slowly turning, I couldn’t help but get a sense of change. The no-see-um, Marathon’s national bird, had started to bite. There were returning geese, in small groups, honking high above as they dissolved their ancient ‘V’ formations. The leaves on the mangrove trees rattled. The winter season was almost over. I was getting close to the time for me to go back to the snow to work.
When I thought about going home, at first, I almost winced. Then I thought of that last phone call to my daughters.
“Be sure to tell everybody down there that I’m the pretty one.”
Well, at least Tara was getting back her normal Ranson humor.
I sat back on that broken lawn chair and studied Someday. The late afternoon light softened the hard edges and the shade hid the more obvious mistakes.
“I’m actually doing it. It’s taken me almost the whole winter of grubby, filthy, shitty work but I’m really fixing something. The reason I came.”
I ran my eyes the entire length of Someday.
“Making something; making someone, better.”
Sitting in the plastic chair, I took a long sip of rum. My eyes never left my boat. There was a long pause as I contemplated Someday’s rudder.
“Not well, mind you.”
The last of the setting sun caught the fresh blue paint of the rudder. It was new and clean and I had done it, all by myself.
“But, it’s a start.”
Rick Ranson 