worked with, he picked up a little Spanish—mostly
words having to do with the weather, because it
seemed to be what everyone talked about on the job.
The winter was mild, even for the Gulf, warm and
still. After work they would all go down to a bar at the
old marina that didn’t bother to check IDs. Charlie
usually bought the >rst round. They would sit out on
the deck for hours and Charlie would look out at the
piers and the few boats in the water and marvel at his
good fortune. Sometimes he still couldn’t believe he’d
made it. He heard that the Southeast had been hit
with freak snowstorms, record lows, ice that snapped
power lines. Who’s too close to the sun now? he
thought, but fought a feeling of unease at the wild
swings of extremes. When he heard a special report
about a blizzard back in Tennessee on the radio one
night at the bar, he couldn’t even picture the place
they were talking about. Still, he whistled through his
teeth, as if he’d made a close call. Está nevando, he
said to the others at the table, and pointed north,
because he hadn’t learned the word for home.
One day at the bar in April, in the >rst hint of the
tropical heat to come, Charlie, half drunk, pulled o=
his shirt and announced he was going in the water.
As the others whooped and cheered, he took o= his
boots, stepped o= the deck, and jogged out onto the
echoing pier. Above the water, white gulls circled. He
looked up at them, then down at his pale feet slapping the warm planks of the pier, then down through
the cracks to the dark water below. He stopped short,
yanked back by a thought that grabbed like the barbs
of a >shhook in the back of his neck.
How many days? How many days did the kid >x its
eyes on the crest of the hill, waiting for him? And Lucy,
out checking the fence line for winter damage, how
many steps did she take toward what was left of it, >rst
thinking it was nothing but a last dirty pile of snow?
The men back at the table watched him. They
wondered why he stood there, staring down
through the planks, rather than diving in. Se le
perdió algo, they said to one another after a while.
He has lost something. a
Orion articles happen through the generosity of readers.
Donate today at orionmagazine.org.
Eskimo whizzamajig
— label circa 1940 for an ivory spear tip in the
MacMillan Collection, Provincetown
Optimism, in a strange,
American way, this zippy
caption for what was foreign
beyond language.
Thingamabob. Doohickey
distant as the need
for a haasux
(spear-thrower in Aleut)
or unaaq (Inupiaq pole
to check ice thickness).
This tool (perhaps a sakku)
clever and useless to the secretary
(was it Miriam?) who typed
the label that has yellowed.
Widget. Whatzit….
but some words drift.
Take vaxa gididzagh, Athabaskan for
that with which things are spread
and so now butter knife.
Or lastax—fermented fur seal flipper—
now the three-petaled gizmo
that spins beneath a boat.
And consider the kayak,
translated through fiberglass
and rotomold,
neoprene and rubber.
Bright alchemy
that’s made it whizzamajig
to its own source.
— Elizabeth Bradfield
