The Seas Read Online Free Page A

screams and yells echo. I swear to God, the hold holds onto the yelling and bounces it around,” he said.
    Jude didn’t go to Mexico and he didn’t go to Canada. Instead he tore up his Social Security card while I watched. He thought that was a good idea until he was denied military disability because his body wasn’t wounded just his head. So he went down to the welfare office to apply, but the first document they wanted to see from him was his Social Security card. So Jude gave up on the government.
    When Jude got home from Iraq he went back to his old job fishing. It doesn’t pay well but it does pay him in cash at the end of each day depending on what is caught. It’s what he used to do before he joined the Army. He’s good at it but if you don’t own your own boat it’s a very hard way to live.
    “I already served my four years,” he said, “And so I thought about deserting,” he said. “Because I didn’t want to kill other poor people. I didn’t want anything to do with the war anymore. But if you desert the Army hires these guys called bounty hunters, brutal guys who hunt down and turn in AWOL soldiers for money. They throw you in a military prison that would make a regular prison look like a vacation resort. In a military prison you have no rights and the people guarding you are other soldiers so they really want to kill you for deserting. I didn’t have the spine for it but I thought about it everyday.”
    Even though Jude is back from the war he still is not my boyfriend the way I thought he would be. But he stays close by and he takes care of me. When I need it, he’ll shake my hand with a twenty dollar bill folded up inside his palm. He passes me the money smiling like he’s a big-time crime boss or like he’s my father. When I come down to the docks to meet his boat he stands directly behind me, his shoulder and thigh touching mine so that an ex-con named Larry, who was sent to prison for arson though every one knows he also killed his girlfriend, will stop leering the way he does at anything female. Jude and I see each other everyday. Last week he brought me a miniature bouquet, like a bouquet for a mouse. It was one or two purple asters, their stems wrapped in the foil from a peppermint patty. Sometimes he comes by after noon, after the boat he fishes for comes in or else he’ll drop by before he goes out drinking or sometimes if he’s feeling badly he’ll make a howling sound, a coyote noise late, late at night outside my window. I’ll look down into the street at him and when he sees me he stops howling and just looks at me until he calms down. We don’t talk but stare at each other through the glass of the window. After fifteen minutes or so he usually goes home to bed.
    Jude is in my kitchen watching me get lunch for my grandfather, a tin of tuna fish with some crackers soaked in the fish packing oil. My grandfather is in the living room typesetting his dictionary, like a crossword puzzle but a bit more involved. He is working on the etymology of the word “hold,” as in a ship’s hold. He’ll go back centuries, looking through old dictionaries, cross-referencing any usage, searching for the word’s birth. When I bring him his lunch I ask, “What have you found?”
    “Well,” he says, “the word hold is Dutch in origin. It’s actually hol and shares a root with hollow.”
    “That’s nice,” I say distracted by the way Jude is sitting on our kitchen stool with his legs gently parted.
    “But even closer in origin,” my grandfather continues, taking a bite of the tuna fish, “is the word hell.”
    I pass Jude in the kitchen and I can smell him. He has been drinking a bit. Still he smells good. “Come here, girl,” he says and he pulls me towards him so that I can feel his breath on my neck. Jude and I do not have any regular sort of relationship. He is not my boyfriend. He says he is too old to be my boyfriend. But he pulls me onto his lap. He breathes in my ear. He