Beauty: A Novel by Frederick Dillen Page B

she was doing. It was a roomful of fish-town working people, brand new to her, and she seemed at home. Mostly at home.
    He wished she didn’t look like she was smelling something. All Easy could smell was low tide that the evening air was breathing into town. Nothing new in that—Easy loved the smell—but now she was checking out around her like she might have to shout Fire. Everybody was noticing now. Hold on, Carol, Easy thought, it’s going to be all right. He wished he could run up, whisper, “This is what you do for a living, Carol. This is what you were made for,” as if he knew.
    She stood alone there in front of Elizabeth Island in her dark suit, and her quiet (a sexy thing, quiet) was enough to keep him sitting along with everybody else, waiting for her to speak.
    She looked over everybody’s heads.
    She said, “I smell the ocean.”
    She said it loud, or it sounded loud because it was so quiet in the room. She sure didn’t have to be loud to be heard. Also, nobody besides her would be surprised to smell the ocean in Elizabeth, but nobody said that. It stayed quiet but for Carol, now that she was going.
    She said, “I didn’t see anyone climb the stairs with reverence, but those names on the walls of the stairwell up to this room, those must be the names of men from Elizabeth Island who died at sea. Isn’t that right?”
    That was one way to start. The whole room nodded, Easy, too, and all of a sudden, he wanted the rest of the room to go away so he could listen by himself.
    Carol said, “Anna Rose. Do you have family on that wall?”
    Buddy’s mother stood up and said, “Yes, I do,” and sat back down.
    Carol said, “Easy, I saw Parsonses on the wall. Is that you?”
    Easy couldn’t help it. He wanted to tell her, right out loud, how pretty she was. Instead, he stood up and said, ashamed but all in, “No, that’s not me, Ms. MacLean. That’s my family on the wall, but Easy Parsons is right here, alive still, and that’s what I’m hoping to stay.”
    Everyone laughed, and he sat down, afraid to look and see if she hated him.
    She was quiet, and he peeked. She didn’t look pissed. She looked ready to go again. Maybe he’d been useful, which was all, until now, he’d wanted since he left Mississippi.
    She said, “I’d be curious to know how many of you do have family or connections of one kind or another on that wall, how many of you knew the people behind the most recent sets of names. Would you forgive me if I asked you to stand up?”
    Easy got himself up quick, but so did the rest of the room. A working fish-town in its bones, all of them stood. Easy knew them all, except Carol, and Carol belonged here even though she was pretty. Everybody else—him, too, obviously—was a long way from pretty. The men were lumps or withering or broken in half, from jobs that ate your body. Most of them also didn’t care so much about shaving. The drinkers, men and women both, it was in their faces. The druggers, a few had come, the old ones, which you never expected at first but you weren’t going to mistake them; they’d have come because they knew they had a connection in the crowd. The women didn’t look a hell of a lot different, though there were Asian and South American women who had showed up mostly without their men. All the women’s hair, long and short, looked ratty, only some on purpose. There was muscle on some of the women and fat on some, though not so much of the fat. Working women, and they’d popped out kids. A couple of the women had been pretty as girls, he knew from firsthand viewing, and he would never tell them they’d changed even if in high school they’d told him it was a good thing he could do this or that because otherwise he was a mirror-breaker. What was best about this ugly crowd, though, was they dressed great. Biggest clothing store in town was work clothes, and that store was on hard times with everybody else. The men’s shirts in the room here were torn or lost