Free Beauty: A Novel by Frederick Dillen Page B

deputy commissioners and assistants to directors and low-level scientists and the few wrinkled guys who were just fishermen representing fishermen. She was too unsteady to tell who was speaking, but somebody’s voice came through the gym with the dooming command of all bureaucrats pretending to move things along.
    She looked away from that and up at the far wall to calm her stomach. A great wooden plaque told which school basketball players had scored the most points ever. The best, with more than two thousand points, had graduated in 1962. But the second best, also with more than two thousand, had graduated only the year before. Elizabeth Island must have had a team. Carol was glad for them. As an awkward kid who spent most of her time in her alley with older guys and her bent Mustang, she’d never gone to her high school’s games. But as an undertaker, when she was in a town for the only reason she was ever in a town, she always hoped that some team was winning.
    A new voice came, and it was familiar. It was Easy, just like Carol had hoped. She could tell he was at home with himself and that he had real news whether or not his peer fishermen had enough political or economic weight to warrant him saying it. Carol was more interested just in looking at him. He wore old khakis and a flannel shirt over a long-sleeve undershirt, and the sleeves of both shirts were rolled up to his elbows. She looked at the hair on his strong forearms and wondered, like a teenager, if he was handsome.
    She quieted everything in her stomach and listened to his slow, assured persuasion. You knew he was one of the guys who made a living, and he seemed to think he could keep doing it. He explained that his vessel was rigged so he could go to species or location the minute they opened. Other people could do the same. Derby fishing, he called it. Carol had come thinking the fishermen couldn’t make it work, and it turned out she was wrong, which was interesting. And yet, what was strangest to Carol was that as she watched Easy, she felt an alarm deep inside herself. She hadn’t felt that—though there had been other men—since she was a teenager with Dominic.
    She looked away to the men standing just to the right and behind her, and they were standing the same way Easy was standing. That was why she was losing her balance: they all stood as if the gym were rocking, as if the gym were a boat on water, and she was on it with them.
    Carol was seasick, and as seasick as she felt, or because she felt so seasick, she was full of wonder that these men made their lives on the empty ocean, out of sight of land. She leaned toward the bleachers so she could hold on to the end of a bench.
    To keep the seasickness away, she closed her eyes and imagined herself nowhere near the ocean. She thought about the alley and Dominic. He had a great car. He let her work on it with him, and he helped with the beat-up Mustang she’d bought, but only when she needed muscle or extra hands—she didn’t ever want to think she was not the one who did what she did. His dad was dead. He only had his mother like Carol only had her father. You were a different person if one of your parents was dead, and Carol thought it made Dominic kinder, not that he didn’t kick ass in his car. Then they found out it was a law that if you were the only son of a widow, you didn’t get drafted, although that hardly mattered at first. What mattered was, to begin with, they got to be friends so fast. It was as one-two-three as sunup, no question. But friends were one thing. The other guys in the alley were friends, even if never like her with Dominic. The crazy-as-science-fiction part was that she knew ahead of time that he loved her, when anybody else would have thought it was still only cool-Dominic and just-Carol, car pals. She never planned, or even honestly understood, what she hoped. Simply one day she knew past all that, which shouldn’t seem brave but was as brave as she’d ever