So Shelly by Ty Roth

Author:Ty Roth [Roth, Ty]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-375-89792-4
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2011-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

11

“Keats.”

I vaguely heard my name, but it failed to stimulate any kind of synaptic reaction or verbal response from inside the syrupy morass of my muted consciousness.

“Keats.”

There it was again. This time a little more forceful and accompanied by something poking at my rib cage, a poking that chased what had been my temporarily unfettered thoughts and reconnected them to the weighty and disappointing reality of a body that was scrunched, fetal position, on a cold, hard, and momentarily unidentifiable surface.

“Keats! Wake up. We’ve got to go.”

Gordon. It was Gordon. Somehow, at some point in the night, I’d managed to fall asleep on the dock with a moldy-smelling life preserver under my head for a pillow.

“What time is it?” I asked for no relevant reason other than to delay my ascent to the surface of awareness and to prevent a crippling case of the psychic bends.

“Time to get the fuck out of here. Let’s go. Undo that spring line and hop in,” Gordon directed.

I had no clue what a spring line was (I was picturing a Paris fashion show), but since there was only one rope still tied to the cleat on the dock, I figured that was it. I undid the simple knot and slid on board.

“Here,” he said, and handed me the urn. “Hold Shelly.”

The surface of the urn was warm. Gordon must have slept with Shelly snug to his body. I smiled at him.

“What?” Gordon asked defensively.

“Nothing,” I said, but he knew that I knew.

A quiet pall had descended on the early morning that would have seemed impossible during the raucous hours just prior. It evoked a stillness unlike any I had ever experienced growing up on my busy, well-lit Ogontz street, where cars whizzed past at all hours no more than fifty feet from my bedroom window, and sirens seemed to blare constantly. In my neighborhood, one learned early to discern the sympathetic wail of an ambulance from the angry command of a police car from the abject terror of a fire engine. Here, there was only the primordial quiet of an inland sea. The sole sounds were the occasional lapping of current against the dock pilings and the groaning of a too taut line being stretched to its excruciatingly painful extreme like an accused heretic on the rack.

Gordon gently turned the ignition switch as if his delicate handling would somehow convince the engines to understand our need for stealth. Unlike my rousing, theirs was immediate and enthusiastic, like two puppies at play, but even their boisterous barking wasn’t shrill enough to penetrate the depths of drunkenness into which most of our neighbors had descended. Gordon’s goal was to limit as severely as possible any record or awareness of our coming or going, so we idled out of our slip and out of the docks, into the harbor, leaving a barely discernible and untraceable wake writ on the water’s surface.

As we inched out into the narrow latitudinal channel separating South from Middle Bass Island, Gordon turned on the running lights and eased the throttles forward.

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