His two older sisters had left the reservation as soon as they married, his father was dead, and his mother, well, she might as well have been -- lying around the house, drinking up what little money there was. So at sixteen, Jason went to work.
He tried farming for his uncle, but there wasn’t enough money in it to support one family, let alone two, so he headed for Port Hancock and the docks. He had grown up tall and tough, and he was willing to put in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. So he lied about his age and hired on as a deckhand aboard a deep-sea charter boat called the Seaworthy.
The captain was a crusty, hard-drinking, fifty-something loner named Barney Cosgrove who took a genuine liking to the kid. He couldn’t afford to pay him much more than the minimum wage, but he was willing to let Jason live aboard. And many a comfortable evening was spent by the two of them, in the aft cabin, over a bottle of rum, with Barney chain-smoking cigarettes and spinning tall tales about his younger days on the high seas.
In truth, Jason wasn’t all that interested in the fish stories or the tobacco, but he developed a real liking for the smooth Caribbean liqueur.
It was an arrangement that suited them both quite nicely for more than six years, until the day that Barney collapsed on deck and was rushed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with both cirrhosis of the liver and stage-four lung cancer. It was too late to do much about either, and Barney was not a man to tolerate a slow, painful demise. So one morning, not two weeks later, he sent Jason off to town on some pretext or another, and set out to sea alone. As soon as he was well clear of the harbor, and far enough out in open water, he blew himself and the Seaworthy to smithereens.
Which left Jason without a job, without a home, and without the man who had had a whole lot to do with how he had grown up. He moved from boat to boat after that, taking on jobs when they were available. He liked some of the boats he worked on better than others, but none of the captains treated him as well as Barney Cosgrove had.
In down times, he helped out over at The Last Call Bar & Grill, one of the bars that populated the lower Broad Street area just off the docks. Instead of a paycheck, Billy Fugate, the owner, paid him in food and rum and a little cash on the side. Jason preferred it that way.
He appropriated a large cardboard box from a dumpster behind an Old Town warehouse, fastened a waterproof tarp around it, and for further protection, wedged it between one of the breaks in the thick stone wall that ran along the alley behind the bar. For a dollar, he bought a big dog bed at the local thrift store. For another dollar, he got an old army blanket. After that, whenever he wasn’t at sea, the box was his home.
“You got a bit of money in your pocket, so why don’t you go get yourself a nice room over at Miss Polly’s?” Billy suggested. Miss Polly Peterson ran a boarding house on Bayview Avenue, just two blocks from the bar.
“Don’t need a room,” Jason told him. “Not around that much.”
And that was true for several more years. Then, two days before he turned twenty-eight, as he was climbing the main mast of a visiting schooner -- a beautiful boat poorly treated by her master -- it suddenly snapped beneath him, sending him hurtling to the deck, fracturing his right shoulder and crushing his right leg. The doctor who treated him at the hospital told him he was lucky -- that he could have fractured his skull or severed his spine, or not even survived the fall at all.
But Jason didn’t feel particularly lucky. The shoulder eventually healed well enough, but the leg, put back together with steel rods and pins as best the doctor could when Jason refused to let him amputate, never really healed properly, causing him constant pain and balance problems and leaving him unfit to go to back to sea.
After that, Jason pretty much drifted. He was good at fixing things, so people hired him to do odd jobs -- there were always odd jobs that needed doing. But the people that hired him were frequently those who couldn’t afford to pay him, and more often than not, didn’t.
Still, it wasn’t so bad. He didn’t need much. He collected a little money, here and there, and Billy Fugate gave him regular work. He would show up at The Last Call a couple of hours before closing, clean up the kitchen, wash out the latrines, sweep up the floors, and wipe down the tables and the bar.
He was allowed to eat whatever food was left over, and then he would sit at the bar, sipping on the rum liqueur he had come to like so much, before taking out the trash, and heading back to his box.
Along the way, he built a better box, from some scrap cedar and insulation instead of cardboard. With the tarp fastened around that, and a heavy plastic flap he found to cover the opening, it was as snug as any place out in the open like it was had to be.
Miss Polly was a nice lady, and he knew he could have gotten a room over at her place. She had told him as much on any number of occasions. But the truth of it was, he
