Daniel Gumbiner - The Boatbuilder

Nell finished her stretch and started for the couch but something caught her eye. She approached the desk instead.

“Have you been painting, Berg?”

“Kind of,” he said. He set the tea down on the coffee table and followed her over to the desk. “They’re really bad,” he said, picking up one of the paintings.

“They’re not so bad,” she said. “Is this, like, an abstract portrait?”

“It’s a mountain.”

“Okay, yeah, sure,” she said. “I see that. Mountain. Very cool.”

“Those are two little coyotes right there,” Berg said.

“Oh yep, got the coyotes.”

“I saw this painting that Alejandro made… I know they’re not good.”

“They’re not great, but it’s cool. I’m glad you’re doing it. It’s better than playing that role-playing video game on your phone when you get home from work.”

Berg set the painting down and walked over to the couch. Nell followed. He poured them both cups of tea, wrinkled his nose.

“I get frustrated by Alejandro’s talent sometimes,” he said.

“At painting?”

“At painting, at boatbuilding. Mainly boatbuilding. His intelligence is far greater than mine. That is clear to me. And seeing it so clearly… I don’t know. It makes me wonder if this whole thing is futile, if I’m ever going to be able to do the things he does.”

Nell cupped her mug of tea with two hands, blew ripples into it.

“It’s hard when you meet a master,” she said. “I felt that way about my old guitar teacher.”

“Half the time I can’t even follow what he’s talking about,” Berg said. “And then, when I can, when I actually understand the task, there’s a good chance I won’t be able to execute it properly. That’s the most frustrating thing, and it happens all the time. I’ll know how something should be done, but I can’t necessarily do it. My understanding always outstrips my skills.”

Nell took a sip of the tea.

“What makes you think that will ever change?” she said.

TO BERG, THE SHRIEKS and yells of the coyotes sounded like a human party. A party that had been crashed by kids from another town and was, perhaps, about to get out of control. When the sun went down in Talinas, wherever you were, you could hear them. But you could never tell how close they were. Berg had seen a few of them during the day, while walking around the bay. They seemed watchful but relaxed, like rangers patrolling the county.

The coyotes sounded loudest from Woody’s porch, where Berg often found himself after work. Uffa, it turned out, was close friends with Woody, and around 5 p.m. he and Berg would usually go over to Woody’s house and sit on the porch and drink a couple of beers. While they drank, the coyotes would bark and shriek and Woody would complain about this, insist that there used to be fewer coyotes, that things in the neighborhood were quieter then.

Woody lived up by the gas station, in an area that was known locally as the Plains. It was situated on the northern edge of the town and it was considerably more down-at-the-heel. A couple of single-story apartment complexes but mostly mobile homes, parked haphazardly on an expanse of thistle and grass. There were clotheslines strung between trees and rusted beach chairs and abandoned crab traps. Almost everyone except for Woody and his girlfriend, Claudette, was Latino. One of the mobile homes had been converted into a taco truck and Berg, Uffa, and Woody ate there often. Woody usually ordered seven tacos and two Modelo Negras. Most of the time he didn’t finish the last taco. Sometimes he didn’t finish the last two tacos.

“Why don’t you order fewer tacos to begin with?” Uffa said.

“I was raised in a home of scarcity,” Woody said. “I have instincts. I can’t help myself.”

Like many people in Talinas, Woody seemed to have several different jobs. Some days he milked Al Garther’s cows and other days he would be weeding Julian Lewis’ front yard. On occasion, if they were short-handed, he washed dishes at the Station House. He also had his standing gig at the Tavern on Friday nights where he’d sing his deer songs.

Sometimes, instead of sitting on the porch, they would go inside and watch Woody’s favorite show, Salvage Kings. In one episode, the main guy salvaged a large fan and valves from a mill in South Carolina. In another episode, they built a coffee table out of an old factory cart. Woody was always talking about things he might potentially salvage around Talinas.

“One day I’m going to head up there and take that old windmill from Gary Larson’s dairy and hang it on the front of the trailer. I’m also interested in that pile of dowel rods next to Daryl Shapton’s driveway.”

“What do you want with a pile of dowel rods?” Uffa asked.

“I have yet to decide.”

Woody told stories about his past but they were often disjointed and difficult to follow, like an avant-garde novel. Over time, Berg began to piece together a sense of his biography. Woody had run away from home at sixteen and moved to Chicago to join an anarchist collective, where he’d met a man named Treehouse John.

“We were doing a lot of graffiti and stuff,” Woody said, “and we issued political manifestos every once in a while. But honestly, most of it was just partying. By 1969, it was obvious nothing was gonna change so that’s when me and John decided to go to Hawaii.”

In Hawaii they lived in a tent on the beach and sold jewelry in town. After a few years, they returned to California, strung out and broke, their skin golden like French fries. They both moved to Talinas and became involved with a drug rehabilitation program that turned out to be a cult.

“We were fooled, I’ll admit it,” Woody said. “But many people were fooled. Like 30 percent of this town are former members.”

“This is the thing with the Morrises?” Berg asked. “The people who thought they were Venutians?”

“No, no, no,” Woody said. “That was only a handful of people. This was a totally different thing. Much bigger. Like I said, 30 percent of the town are former members. Maybe even 40. Who knows? They don’t do polling on this type of stuff so we’ll never know but it could be as high as 40.”

“When did you know it was a cult?” Berg asked.

“When everyone shaved their heads. That’s when I got out. One day they were like: ‘Warren shaved his head and now everyone else is shaving their head!’” Woody tapped his temple. “That’s when I thought, Aha, cult.”

On occasion Woody’s neighbor Diego would come over and hang out with the three of them. He was six foot six and two hundred fifty pounds but he always drank Coronitas, the little seven-ounce beers, because he said they stayed cold and carbonated the whole time you drank them. Diego was the manager on Al Garther’s ranch. He was the one who helped Woody secure jobs around the county. His wife, Esme, kept several birds as pets. A few months ago, Woody had found an injured snowy plover and brought it to their house and Esme had nursed it back to health.

“She fed it… What did she feed it?” Woody said.

“Mashed-up crickets,” Diego replied.

“Mashed crickets,” Woody said, wonder in his voice. “Mashed crickets, that’s right. And then all of a sudden it was better. Incredible. She’s a genius, that woman.”

Woody was in his early sixties. He lived with his girlfriend, Claudette, who usually came home late in the evening and joined them on the porch. She was a little younger than Woody, with brown hair and warm, hooded eyes. She had come to Talinas in the ’90s after the two of them started dating. They had met at the Six Flags in Vallejo, where Claudette used to work.