Daniel Gumbiner - The Boatbuilder

“If you ever want to talk about it, I am here,” Alejandro continued.

“Thanks,” Berg said. “I don’t need to talk, but thanks.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry. I’d just… I’d rather not talk about it.”

“That’s fine, Berg,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

They finished eating the trout and wiped the grease off on their pants. Before they left, Alejandro admired the pepperwood one more time.

“Yes,” he said, seeming satisfied. “Time to go home.”

“I DIDN’T KNOW YOU hadn’t told them,” Nell said on the phone that night. “I’m sorry. You’re right, it’s your story to tell, but I just assumed you had told them. I mean, you’ve been living and working with these people all day every day for what? The last six months?”

“Well, you should have asked me first,” Berg said.

“Okay, you’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I apologize for that.”

Berg looked out the window of the cubby. The trees behind the farmhouse looked green and bunchy, like broccoli florets.

“I still want you to come up this weekend,” Berg said, his voice softening.

“I was still planning on it,” she said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell them? Why don’t you talk about it?”

“I don’t know,” Berg said.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Berg. You had a concussion. You kept having all those headaches. They prescribed you painkillers.”

“I know.”

“So there’s nothing to be ashamed about, right?” Nell said.

“Right.”

After they hung up he leaned back in bed. The things Nell said were not untrue, but they were incomplete. The way she told it, he was blameless. But he didn’t feel like that. He felt responsible. He needed to be responsible. If he wasn’t, then he lost all agency, any ability to combat the problem.

He thought back to beginning of everything, to the concussion, three years ago. It had been a long time since he’d been skiing and he was having a nice time. Nell was down at the lodge and he was out on the slopes by himself. The air smelled like pine and hard rock and sweet alpine meadow. The sounds of the mountain were muted and seemed to come one at a time, emerging in their full particularity and then disappearing back into the white silence: the flap of a bird’s wing, the scrape of a snowboarder passing him on his right, carving her way through the ice.

When Berg had finished the first few blue squares he felt ready for something more difficult. He took a lift to the top of the mountain, which would allow him to take any number of routes back to the bottom. Once up there, he approached a man who was wearing a red shirt that said staff. The man’s face looked red and burned, like a piece of meat that had just been taken out of the freezer. Berg asked him what the easiest black diamond was and the man said, “Devil’s Gulch.”

Devil’s Gulch was not the easiest black diamond. Berg would learn this an hour later, as he sat in the emergency first-aid hut at the bottom of the mountain, getting examined by a nurse with a shaved head.

“What run were you coming down?” the nurse asked.

“Devil’s Gulch.”

“Oh boy,” the nurse had said.

But Berg had no time to be angry. Or, rather, he didn’t have the capacity to be angry. He could not think. His head felt like a wide-open field. The field was full of crickets and Tylenol pills and the occasional question from Nell, who drove him to the hospital, where they took an X-ray of his brain to make sure that he wasn’t bleeding internally and then sent him home with a pamphlet about concussions and his first ever bottle of hydrocodone. He sat down on the hotel couch and closed his eyes. He felt off balance and a little queasy and there was often a humming in his ears. At times he felt immensely peaceful and other times he felt afraid and angry. He saw various shapes and overall, he told Nell, it felt a little bit like he was on mushrooms. After the hydrocodone kicked in, he fell asleep on the couch, and then Nell helped him move into bed. In the middle of the night he woke up, terrified that someone was going to break into the house. He lay awake, convinced that it was only a matter of time before someone busted through the door and attacked him and his girlfriend. Eventually he fell back asleep. In the morning, when he woke up, he remembered only certain moments from the previous day. He remembered hitting the mogul and flying face first into the sheet of ice. He remembered someone calling out to him from a chairlift overhead, asking if he was okay. He remembered talking to the nurse at the bottom of the hill. He did not remember getting an X-ray. He did not remember fearing a break-in at midnight.

Nell drove him home the following day. It was a bright day, with a bright sky and a few clouds, very high up, that seemed to have no interest in getting any closer to earth. Berg and Nell listened to a book on tape and blasted the heat and stopped, at one point, to eat cheeseburgers and pie.

“How do you feel?” Nell asked him.

“Better,” he had said. “I feel better already.”

BY MARCH, THEY’D MADE good progress on JC’s sloop. The stem and stern were cut, the frames were up, and the lead keel had been cast. It was around this time that someone stole Alejandro’s van and dumped it in the ravine by the 12. They never figured out who did it but, at some point, Freddie Moltisanti told Uffa that he thought it was a group of teenagers who had taken it. Freddie never said how he knew this, and Alejandro didn’t believe him. Freddie was prone to lying. When he was younger, Freddie had been something of a local celebrity because he ran away from home for a week and lived in a cave. He was twelve years old and, allegedly, he survived on wild apples and several packages of saltines. Alejandro didn’t believe this story either.

In any case, the car was totaled and irretrievable and Alejandro left it in the ravine. A few weeks after it was stolen, JC stopped by the shop. Berg could tell he was important the moment he walked in. People often came by to see Alejandro. Joe Leggett was right that certain people thought Alejandro was crazy, but others clearly respected him. Neighbors would stop in with an extra fish they’d caught or some fresh corn or a root that they were trying to identify. They came around lunchtime and waited patiently outside the barn until Alejandro had finished his work. But JC didn’t do this. He stormed into the barn early one morning with no advance notice. He was a large man, two hundred pounds or so of sauntering muscle, and he wore a red knitted beanie. A smoky, fruity odor clung to him, as if he’d just come from a hookah bar.

“Alejandro!” he shouted. “You guys are doing great things. I need you to come with me for a second. I’m gonna show you something.”

To Berg’s surprise, Alejandro agreed. He had never seen Alejandro put down his work in the middle of the day for some random request. In fact, the most predictable way to irritate Alejandro was to distract him from his work. Now that Berg had done some boatbuilding, he understood why. The work required serious focus and any diversion made it that much more difficult.

As Alejandro and JC walked out of the shop, JC noticed Berg.

“Hey, who are you?” he asked.

Berg looked up from the plank he was spiling and introduced himself.

“This a new guy?” JC said to Alejandro. “You didn’t tell me that you had a new guy.”

“Berg’s been with us for several months now,” Alejandro said.

“Fuck yeah!” JC shouted. “Berg! My man. You’re coming with us, too. Come on.”

Berg looked at Alejandro and Alejandro smiled. “Come on,” he said. “You can finish that later.”