Daniel Gumbiner - The Boatbuilder

Also at the bar was Tom, an older rancher with coarse, unfinished features. Tom was slowly settling into dementia and he was no longer able to add sums well. Every time he settled up his tab, he’d count and recount his money, licking his finger before removing each dollar bill and placing it on the table.

“Oh hang on, let me start again,” he’d say, shaking his head. Sometimes Ed Conotic came over and counted the money for him.

“You’ve got seven here, Tom. Three beers so you owe nine.”

“Oh I knew I was missing a few. Knew I was missing a few.”

There was John Coleman, too, the fisherman, and a younger guy he hung around with named Dennis Lapley. And there was Claire, an engineer for the water district, and her boyfriend, Lenny, and Joe Leggett, who delivered gas tanks and had fought in the Korean War and seemed to have a lot of hobbies. On Friday nights, there was a guy named Woody who played a thirty-minute set of his own country songs, which were mostly about deer.

“This song’s about a deer I saw that went and disappeared behind a hillside,” he would say. Or: “This is a song about two small deer and one medium deer that I saw on the road by the Dance Palace.”

The only person Berg had talked to about pills was Lapley. Berg could tell he was an addict the moment he met him: the small bruises on his arms, the runny nose, the constant sniffing. Lapley was from Oregon but he’d worked in construction in Talinas for a few years now. Berg suspected that he was in his thirties but he wasn’t sure. His eyes were small and dull and it seemed like the skin on his face had been stretched tight and then stapled across his jawline. Unlike Berg, Lapley shot up, and he once asked Berg if he wanted to join him in the bathroom.

“Nah, man,” Berg said. “I stay away from needles.”

“It’s the same thing,” Lapley said. “You’re kidding yourself. It’s the exact same thing.”

Lapley said he was a volunteer with the Sheriff’s Department and claimed he could arrest people. Berg didn’t believe it. A dopehead volunteering with the Sheriff’s Department? Lapley seemed to lie about almost everything. But when he spoke about the two times he’d been through withdrawal, Berg had the sense that he was telling the truth. Lapley’s descriptions reminded Berg of his own experience: sweats, muscle spasms, watery eyes, stomach cramps, violent shaking.

“I did it all on my own,” Lapley boasted. “And I know, if I wanted to, I could do it again. Don’t need no damn rehab center holding my hand.”

Berg had gone to rehab. For the first two weeks they’d put him on Clonidine, Baclofen, Meloxicam, and Gabapentin; 50 mg Seroquel or 100 mg Trazodone to help him sleep. And then, after the first month, Clonidine as needed, Vistaril for anxiety, B12 vitamins, a slow tapering of his Gabapentin dose, peaking at 1600 mg. Antidepressants, too, mostly Wellbutrin, 150 mg, but also 30 mg of Prozac.

It was important to identify your triggers, they had told Berg, to know them and track them. Eliminate your supply. Remove the numbers from your phone. And he had done this, deleted Eugene’s number from his phone, all the people he’d ever taken pills with. When the opportunity to house-sit for Mimi materialized, it seemed like a good first step toward reestablishing a sober life. If he moved up to Talinas, he could stay with Nell while also putting some tangible distance between himself and the world of his addiction.

But shortly after he moved up there he’d relapsed. He was over at Gloria and Jerry’s for a neighborly dinner and, during a trip to the bathroom, he couldn’t resist opening the medicine cabinet. Gloria and Jerry were old people and old people in America always had opioids. Like fifteen different kinds of opioids. It was as if they had been collecting them since the ’60s, planning to bring them over to Antiques Roadshow and get them appraised.

The next couple of weeks were immensely pleasurable. Berg’s stretch of abstinence had lowered his tolerance and he was able to get high in a way that had eluded him in the months prior to rehab. He stopped calling his sponsor, stopped going to the NA meetings in Pine Gulch. When his supply ran out, he began to casually enter homes that appeared unoccupied. He usually picked homes that were along the hiking trail, and he always carried a walking stick with him. If someone caught him, he would say he was lost and had been looking for some place to use a phone.

Every addict has a story about the impermanence of their addiction. For Berg, at this time, the return of Nell would constitute the end of his use. She was still on tour, had been on tour for the last two months. He was only doing this until she returned, having one last affair with opioids before he buckled down and endured sobriety for the rest of his life.

This was why he had gotten sober in the first place, why he had gone to rehab and quit his job at Cleanr and moved up here. He was sick of the city. It was all garbage and noise and men with gelled hair. He intended to go clean in more than one sense: he wanted to find work that was simple and fulfilling, to live a life of health and exercise and fresh air. But at the moment, these ambitions seemed distant.

One morning, after a night of drinking at the Tavern, he woke up with a headache. The headaches had a creepy, slinky quality at first, as if he were prey and they were stalking him. The pain was not there but he knew it was on its way, knew that a slight movement or sound could catalyze it. He took a couple of Vicodin and started a pot of coffee. While he was waiting for the coffee, he headed down to the coop to feed the chickens.

It took him a few moments to process the scene of carnage he encountered. One of the chickens, Baton Rouge, was missing and there were feathers and blood all over the plywood floor. Sacramento and Atlanta were pecking at Lansing, who appeared gravely wounded. Berg yelled at the two of them and shooed them away and then picked up Lansing, who had a bad wound near her neck. She shuddered in his arms and he whispered calming things in her ear. When she seemed still enough, he began walking toward the house.

He couldn’t leave her outside but he couldn’t let her run around loose inside Mimi’s house either. In the end, he decided to place her inside Fish’s crate. He pulled out Fish’s bed, which was covered in black dog hair, and laid down newspaper for Lansing. Fish trotted over, clearly disturbed. He kept looking at the crate and then looking back at Berg, waiting for someone to explain this obvious injustice.

Back in the kitchen Berg consulted the note Mimi had left him and found the number he was looking for.

“If there are any problems with the animals,” she had written, “call Ben at 415-327-6688.”

Berg called Ben and began explaining, in great detail, what he had found in the chicken pen.

“Blood everywhere,” he said, and then he repeated it: “everywhere!” As he relived the scene, the drama of the moment really took hold of him. He was a little stoned now, the headache receding but still there.

“I’ll be right over,” Ben said.

Ben was in his late thirties, with thinning hair and some kind of red streak in his right eye. He wore a white shirt with holes in it and a camouflage baseball hat. He had tattoos on his knuckles. Ben surveyed the coop for a minute and discovered a gap between two of the boards. He kneeled down, examined the crevice, and then issued his verdict:

“Looks like a coyote got ’em.”

“A coyote?” Berg said.

“Yep, must have snuck right through here, picked his favorite chicken, and scurried off for a nice dinner.”

Ben told Berg that he should build a wire fence around the coop. He said the fence should go down eighteen inches underground to prevent the coyotes from burrowing beneath it.