Mendocino Fire (2 page)

Nobody had been doing well this summer, but this morning the salmon had started biting so hard before dawn that they
didn't have time
to shit, shower, or shave
, Shug said, and when Nate poured the last of the coffee from the thermos and handed the cup to his dad, Shug said, “Kept up with me pretty good.” Under its mask of salt spray Nate's face warmed at the praise; relief swept in, as if he had at last been recognized as the right son. As if they could go from here, and disappointment in him would never again cloud Shug's expression or turn him sarcastic. Money worries were eating at Shug, and on a boat there is no escaping somebody else's foul mood. Late at night when Shug was topside, bullshitting on the radio, Nate sought comfort by imagining different girls from high school straddling him, their hair swinging forward, palms on his chest, the fantasy heightened if he didn't summon a particular girl but passively awaited a face or a voice. That the face, when it appeared, belonged more and more often to a girl named Ollie surprised him. He had never gone out of his way to talk to Ollie, nobody did, but sometimes they had ended up together on the graffitied boulder jutting from the weedy slope descending to the football field, the boulder the designated site for pairings permitted nowhere else, the refuge where she set about dismantling his naïveté. What had gone wrong in Newfoundland was going wrong all over and within fifty years every fishery on the planet would collapse, did he
get
that? Or: the tsunami that was destined for the coast would roll right over the cliffs and plunge across the field below with its bright scatter of seven-year-old soccer players jogging into the wind. They sat on their boulder smoking and picturing drowning second graders. Ollie was their school's oddball star, the kind of student teachers wanted too much from: flashes suited her, intuitions, but not structure, not obligation or rules or any voice urging responsibility or
goals in life
. Boundaries offended her, a fact that partly explained why she systematically
violated his, pinching the cigarette without asking, tipping her head back to exhale, comically vamping. He could not overcome his sense that she was a disaster, but this was not entirely off-putting. Ollie clasped her knees in her arms and rocked, or she tinkered with her hair, fooling with this project on her head, tatty homegrown security blanket. Faithful as she seemed in her obscure devotion to him, she was rumored to sleep around, and Petey Crews added her name to the boys' john's tally of girls who gave head, but Nate didn't believe it, not this girl who wanted to crew on a Greenpeace boat, whose T-shirt claimed
Fur Is Murder
, who believed the world needed saving, starting with him, Nate. He remembers asking about her dreads once.
Why do you want to look like you don't give a shit?
Had she been hurt by the question, had she cared what he thought? He was pretty sure she had, even if the realization was late—more than a year late—in coming. After graduation she must have left town. She had never talked about what things were like at home, and he can't remember any mother or other family showing up at high school events. Her dad had died when she was nine, and another girl would have incorporated the tragedy into her persona, but Ollie told him no details. Nate conjured her expert theft of his cigarette, her chin tilted up, the crawl of smoke from her parted lips, but this version was too accurate, friendly, failing to mine the erotic potential of her vehemence, and fuck this, he was too old to live in such close quarters with his dad, two berths angled toward each other in the V of the bow, the iron woodstove crowding the space even more and smelling sickeningly of the boot polish Shug had dabbed on its scratches.
Jesus, get a fucking life
, he imagined a good friend telling him, but what friend? Petey Crews was in Iraq, Rafe worked for Aboriginal Lumber. Nights off,
when Nate made it to the inn at the crossroads south of town, its gingerbread eaves laced with Christmas-tree lights nobody ever bothered to take down and its marquee promising live music, he had that feeling of waiting for someone, but it wasn't clear who until, one night, Rafe slid onto the next bar stool saying, “N Dawg,” Petey's old greeting. After they had gone over what they knew about Petey and how he was doing, Nate asked Rafe if he remembered a girl named Ollie something.

“Who had a thing for you.”

“She had a thing?”

Rafe smiled down at his beer.

Nate made sure he could be heard over the music: “I was thinking she might of left town, right? Nothing to keep her here. I mean, why're
we
still around?”

The crease at the corner of his mouth deepened as Rafe appreciated his beer. “'Member Annie Brown? A year behind us? Teaches second grade now.”

“Sure. Annie. Went out with Boone Salazar.”

“Not anymore,” Rafe said, and his left hand did a stiff-fingered hula till Nate identified the gleam and said, keeping his tone warm, “What the fuck.”

Rafe said, “At the county courthouse over in Ukiah. Spur of the moment or I would've called.” In high school they had vowed to be there for each other, to work it out so they each got a shot at best-man-dom, Rafe and Nate and Petey Crews, but Nate didn't hear any real apology in Rafe's tone, and his embarrassed sense of exclusion, disguised by rapping the bar for another couple of beers, drove home the sadness of their having gone separate ways. Petey had been the glue, Petey had seemed to have the most at stake in their comradeship and had gone to
great lengths to keep them entertained, or as entertained as they could be in Smoke River.

This luminous afternoon when their luck turned for the better, Nate said, “I guess we ought to get back to it.” The hard morning had left Shug's face sweaty and sunburned, his pulse tripping where a vein swelled in his temple, this visibly hardworking vein striking Nate as dangerous. But the veins that were really troublesome were deep in the brain, he told himself, not right out there in the open. “Dad?” “Give me a minute”—not an answer Shug had ever voiced before. “My damn shoulder hurts. You go ahead”—two more things Shug had never said. What it came down to was that time was taking its toll, and at least for this one radiant day he couldn't keep up with his son.

Past midnight now, and Nate hoped Shug had done the smart thing and gone to bed instead of staying up swapping lies on the radio. In the ice hold's echoing chill, his two or three different and overlapping shadows flaring in the corners as the fluorescence quickened, Nate's boots imprinted a melting black meander as he crossed back and forth, slinging fish into the silver dune, tired enough that the prospect of sleep made him want to sink to his knees in the ice like one of those climbers yielding to death on Everest. He clicked off the light before climbing to the deck for a last look around. They were far enough from shore to drift for the night and the
Louise
had settled into near silence. Below in the fo'c'sle he found Shug asleep, longish black hair fanned across the ticking of the pillow, tattered and filthy, that he refused to part with or let Louise wash because he believed it was lucky. Disgusting, Nate said, but his mother laughed and said it could be worse, what if he had lucky Jockey shorts? The
shushing of the sea against the hull turned the space chapel-like, and the need to keep quiet as he undressed made Nate feel like a good child, respectful, or as if he was in the presence of his dead father, feeling what he was supposed to feel.

Not that night but the next, Nate woke to the awareness that Shug's bunk was empty. “Hey, Dad? Where'd you get to?” The deck gleamed back at the moon, the day's blood sluiced away, Shug working while Nate slept: walk barefoot the length of the boat and your feet would stay clean as a newborn babe's. Nate retrieved the toilet seat and clapped it on the bucket, the seat an old wooden one, paint rubbed away in a bottom-shaped arc, his dad's arse and his, any other son would have conceded no more than a postcard, Santa Fe, Sydney, some lawless postmark north of the Arctic Circle. Nate emptied the bucket over the side.

“Dad?”

An arm extended from the door of the cabin, the hand resistless as a dead thing when Nate gathered it up, when he crouched saying, “No, no,” his fingers against the inside of the wrist finding nothing, hoping, finding nothing. Nate let shock carry him a short way into death after his father by neither moving nor blinking, concentrating on the death in his father's face but not knowing what it was like or how to go deeper, to take part in this death that intolerably excluded you and left you hanging. Then stupefaction as the pulse flailed against your fingertips and the need to make sure you weren't deceived by the force of longing. The sea slid past, the moon poured down, and Shug sat up sick and disheveled with a glare that held Nate responsible.

“I think you fell, Dad. Fell and banged your head. Hold on, hold on, don't be thrashing or you could hurt yourself worse.”

In trying to get him to lie back Nate was reminded that Shug was a big man, his back broader across than his son's and showing a distinct slide and play when he worked shirtless, a bunching and cording along his forearm when he threaded the hook into the herring and trimmed its tail till the glint of metal was perceptible, baitfish and hook coequal, no excess for salmon to snatch unscathed. On first demonstrating the technique to Nate, he had said
This is sex. Nothing to spare, no little bit to nibble off. The beauty of it: it's all hook.
Nate had been what, nine? Shocked. Hiding it.

“You got to lie back down, Dad.”

Nate's boots squeaking against the deck, the two men struggled in moonlight strong enough to contract the pupils in Shug's devastated glare. The core of bright mind he had left refused to trust his son.

Even now: refused.

Under his dirty T-shirt, Shug's collarbones were set against him like bull's horns. Gaining secure footing at last, Nate levered his weight into his dad's bad shoulder, and when he yielded his fury was terrifying, Shug gaping up from the deck with his hair strewn across his sweat-polished temples and crazy disbelief in his eyes at having been handled thus. This wrong somehow whistled up more wrong and Nate bent close to say savagely, “You're fucked up, Dad. Now let me do what I need to.”

Nate called from the hospital in Eureka to tell Louise that she should come as soon as she could. Absolutely, the doctor was the best. Yeah, a bypass, kind of thing they do all the time, they said it takes four or five hours and Shug's chances were good but they don't tell you more than that cause they don't want to be liable.
He had resolved not to lie for the sake of reassurance, though the impulse was strong. Nate rested his knuckles against his brow, then recognized his father's gesture for summoning the right answer and dropped his hand, as embarrassed as if he'd stolen something small and personal from Shug. He wasn't sure what to do and whether he should hang around here in the hospital or get back to the harbor where he had left the
Louise
. Nate thought of her as knowing nothing about the boat, but his mother answered that he should stay where he was, the catch could wait until tomorrow, there were plenty of buyers in Eureka and it would all work out. He had expected her to fall apart but she calmly went on. Night driving was hard for her and she wasn't going to rush out the door. Nate heard her light a cigarette, and then she said it was ironic that it wasn't her heart attack, she was the smoker. Nate knocked his forehead against the wall, needing to bump up against something that behaved exactly as expected, and she said she would leave early and get there by ten or eleven. When there was no reply she said, “Are you crying, honey? You did fine. You got the boat in to the nearest harbor, you got to the hospital. Nothing to blame yourself for.” At her saying this, he discovered he'd feared she would hold him responsible for Shug's overexertion. Without meaning to, he had absorbed his father's sense that she could not handle things, but now he got it: she had always handled things, she had seen and understood and had been dealing with god knows how much truth they believed they had kept from her. The thought that came to him was
All that fucking work
. Whose? Theirs. Theirs as a family. He was astonished to the point of tears—more tears. Whatever he confessed would be absorbed and answered in this same intimate, practical tone that wanted only to figure out what they should do next. Treasure was within reach, the treasure of being
listened to and honestly forgiven, but what he came up with was “Mom, I'm so dirty. Right from the boat. I stink,” and she answered that he should find the men's and wash as best he could because he had a long night ahead of him. He should wash his face in cold water. He'd see, that would help.

He told her goodbye and was tapped on the shoulder. Nate could go in for a couple minutes before they put Shug under. He was led through a series of hallways into the room where his father lay on a gurney, his black hair hidden, his large ears jutting from a crinkled shower cap. Against the crisp gown Shug's windburned forearms, the backs of his hands scribbled with fishhook scars, looked more beat-up than ever. He was not sure how he had come to be here; he was balking at the notion of surgery and would have walked out if he could have gotten to his feet, but they had doped him with something that left him subdued and lost. The heart attack and Nate's rough handling had vanished. Apprehensively Nate took Shug's hand and said
You're gonna do fine, Dad
, shocked by the grateful response, Shug's big-knuckled fingers interlacing with his, their hands clasping, tightening, holding fast. Their sustained silence made the nurse frown when she returned, as if they should have been using this time to say last things. In the waiting room Nate found, in a corner, a shabby wing chair, upholstery already so far gone he didn't worry about the stench on his clothes rubbing off. It must be destined for replacement soon, this chair. Hospitals didn't usually tolerate the threadbare companionability of long use. Throughout the murmuring public night people came and went, speaking the cryptic language of anguished uncertainty and, once or twice, breaking down and crying, for which Nate pitied them in his sleep.