Free In the Land of the Living by Austin Ratner Page B

lanky sailor with dirty brown hair sticking out from under a wool cap and big scarred hands clasped behind his head. There were moons of black grease under his fingernails.
    “Yeah, that’s him,” another sailor said. “That’s Cooper right there.”
    Cooper half-turned his head.
    Happy didn’t look up from his fish. All he said was “This fish been dead a long, long time.”
    Before he left the boat, Happy gave Isidore his sou’wester rain hat and his bottles of linseed oil.
    “And you take these pants, too,” Happy said. They were the army pants that Happy said he’d bought on the black market in Vietnam. They’d probably come straight off the legs of a dead GI. “Now you ain’t Schooner Rig no more,” Happy said.
    “Thank you, Happy. That’s real nice of you. It really is.”
    “You believe I killed that boy in Vietnam?”
    “I believe whatever you say, Happy,” Isidore said.
    “Don’t believe whatever I say. Do whatever I say. But believe this: you don’t want to know what I done,” Happy said, and he walked onto the gangway, perfectly steady, and whistling in the Honolulu sunshine.
    That night Happy bought the drinks, and Isidore had no choice but to match him drink for drink. He got so drunk that when he came back up the gangway in the middle of the night alone, high over the black water where duplicates of the harbor lights burned and waved like fire upside down, he walked as slowly as he knew how, thinking, I am too high up. This is the most dangerous thing I have ever done, this is the most dangerous walk I have ever made. But he made it aboard again, and back to his bunk, which was not so noisy as it had been before Happy was put off the ship, but still smelled like engine oil.
    Isidore returned to land, where the light of the table lamp and Laura’s hairbrush and warm, dry, plaid bathrobe remained just as he’d left them. The death dreams fled. By comparison with the sea, medical school seemed civilized, the way a base camp at the foot of the Himalayas must seem civilized in comparison with the storm, snow, and avalanche above. And at the same time he felt a power gathering inside him to summit a mountain, and he smelled the nearness of the peaks in the sharp clarity of the air: he could do it. He was going to be good at this. He was going to do good.

6.
How Isidore Auberon Was Chastened and Bade Anon to Forswear His Penne by James Helpern, the Ghost Boy; of Librium Pills and a Cold Cup of Coffee
    THE CANDLE THAT burned for his mother flickered on the sill, and raindrops traveled slowly down the dark pane facing Overlook Drive. On days like that Isidore read Keats from a wine-red book that still had the Harvard Coop sticker on the back cover, and he copied down a few phrases, which he would toss in a briefcase with poems he had written on prescription pad paper. Sea-shouldering whales, vision of greatness, a new thinking into the heart .
    Isidore grabbed his rough red coat from the hook and said, “Did you know Keats’s girlfriend was named Fanny Brawne?”
    “What does a poem accomplish in this world?” James said. “If you’re gonna waste time, wouldn’t you rather waste it with me at the bar? Cripes, we have boards coming. If you’re gonna read, read Stepp or the New England Journal of Medicine or something. You make me nervous.”
    “Okay, gunner.”
    “No, I’m just here to watch the Isidore Auberon story unfold, the hard-luck kid with the world-class arm, and I don’t want to see you throw it all away on poetry, for criminy cripes.”
    “You can just say ‘Christ,’ James. He isn’t listening.”
    “Not to a couple of Cleveland Heebs.”
    “That’s what poems are for, by the way.”
    “For what?”
    “To get you through life when no one is listening, you heathen. Get your coat on,” Isidore said. “Sweet, sweet Fanny. Oh, Fanny Brawne, how do I love thee, let me count the ways. Fanny Brawne. I think I saw a case of that in proctology clinic.”
    “Speaking of