Daniel Gumbiner - The Boatbuilder

Maze sang for about twenty minutes. His songs were about growing up in the Midwest and being a freak and his asshole stepdad who’d fought in Korea. On occasion, he would hum a saxophone solo. At one point he invited Uffa onstage and they sang a song about a boy who looked like a horse. In the middle of the song, Uffa shook his head and neighed like a horse.

After Maze, a red-haired woman came on stage. Her name was Chloe and she sang quiet, brief love songs. Uffa had told Berg about her. She was one of the housemates from the warehouse and Uffa thought he might be in love with her. Berg looked around the audience as Chloe played and noticed that Alejandro and Rebecca were sitting on chairs by second base, holding hands. Rebecca seemed to be enjoying Chloe’s music a great deal. Her eyes were closed and there was a gentle smile on her face. More than anyone, though, Walt was loving the show. He was sitting front and center, eyes closed, head bobbing side to side.

When Chloe’s set was finished, Uffa announced that there would be a brief intermission and then two closing acts. During the break Berg found himself in line for a drink next to Katherine, of all people.

“Holy shit,” he said. “I had no idea you were coming here.”

“Yeah!” she said. “I saw that Nell was playing a concert at a minor-league baseball stadium and I thought, How the hell can I miss that? How are you? I hear you’re building boats.”

“I am,” he said. “I live about ten minutes away. With the guy who owns this bus, actually.”

They got their drinks and wandered away from the bar. Berg used his beer to swallow a few ibuprofen pills.

“Did you come up alone?” Berg asked.

“Yeah, Eugene had to go to a friend’s birthday.”

“I miss seeing that guy around.”

“He misses you,” she said, laughing. “You guys had a sweet friendship.”

Berg took another sip of his beer, scanned the surrounding crowd, looking for Nell. The intermission was going to be over soon and he still hadn’t had a chance to say hello to her. He wanted to find her before she played. When he looked back at Katherine she had an orange pill bottle out and she was tapping its contents into her hand.

“I have no idea what the fuck I put in here,” she said, squinting at the pills in the low light.

By the time the show started up again, Berg was high, soaring high. He’d taken two Perc 30s and an Adderall and he felt euphoric. His headache disappeared and as he watched Nell step up on stage he was filled with a glowing warmth. When she began to play, he found he was finally able to be present, to drop in and really listen. He’d been elsewhere until he took the pills, he realized, skating across the top of every moment, deterred by the pain. Now he was there, absorbed in Nell’s performance, and it was extraordinary: keening and poetic and heartful. You could see the audience grow more and more enraptured with each song. She finished her set with the seven-minute ballad about California and her aunt and then the audience roared, stamped their feet. Someone handed Berg a mug of wine. He whistled and cheered, took a gulp of the wine.

When Nell left the stage, Uffa introduced the final act, a guy named Wallace Light. Berg had heard his music before because Uffa played his songs in the shop. He liked what’d he’d heard of the album but Light was even better in person. He played keyboard and guitar and sang out of two different microphones. He looped melodies with a pedal. The energy of the set built and built, and you felt like you were on a plane shrieking down the runway, launching into the air. Most people in the audience seemed to know his music and, during his last song, almost everyone sang along.

“If you chase me I’ll run,” they sang:

When the show was over, Uffa and Maze began to close up the bus stage. Berg walked over to help them, and right as he got there, Walt appeared.

“I loved it,” he told Uffa. “So much light, so much energy. This is the best event this town has seen in a long time. There hasn’t been a great show in… I can’t remember how long. But we’re back. This is so important.”

“Thanks, Walt.”

“Did you see that news story today about the Canadian government introducing the buffalo back into Banff National Park?”

“No,” Uffa said, reaching down to unscrew a leg of the stage.

“Airlifted in these big containers,” Walt said. “And the buffalo, sixteen of them, came stampeding back into the park. We wiped out sixty million buffalo but now they’re back. That stampede, that was like tonight, man. We’re back. What a beautiful show.”

When Uffa stood back up, Walt handed him two tickets.

“These are for an Oysters game,” he said. “They’re on me. Take Ale.”

“That’s very kind,” Uffa said.

Walt gave Uffa a hug and then headed toward the parking lot. Once he was out of sight, Uffa gave Berg both of the tickets.

“I hate baseball,” he said.

That night Uffa drove ten people back to the house, mostly friends from the warehouse. Katherine came, too, but she drove over in her own car. They built a fire in front of the bus and then, later, they wandered into the shop. They sat around the workbench, drinking beer and looking up at the boats, their hulls suspended in the air, nodding placidly, like mobiles. Wallace Light was there and Chloe and Demeter. Nell sat on Berg’s lap and they all listened to Uffa as he mused, stoned, about his next move. He said he wanted to go to Rome or Bulgaria or maybe Oaxaca. They had connections in Oaxaca. Alejandro had lived in Salina Cruz for a few years while he was studying the Zapotec.

“What do you think about Oaxaca?” he said to Demeter.

“Uffa, I’m going to New York. You know that,” she said.

“What do you want with New York?” Uffa said, grinning. “Everyone over there is so uptight. Bunch of worker bees in suits.”

“Don’t start with me,” Demeter said.

Around midnight, they wandered back over to the bus and made popcorn with Uffa’s outdoor propane stove. They huddled by the bonfire, drinking wine and eating popcorn and laughing. Eventually, a few people began to leave. Berg saw Katherine say goodbye to Nell and then walk off toward the dark driveway. He hurried after her, his boots squelching in the mud. She was unlocking her station wagon when he caught up to her. They were far away from the party now, and the sound of music and boozy chatter was replaced by the spare sounds of night in Talinas: faint rustlings, hooting owls, silence.

“Hey, it was good to see you,” Berg said.

“Oh, you too, Berg,” she said, her voice full of warmth and fatigue.

“Just wanted to say bye,” he said. “I was also wondering if you could give me Eugene’s number? I got a new phone and I lost it.”

“Yeah, totally,” she said, fishing her phone out of her pocket. “He’d love to hear from you.”

IN THE BRIGHT WHITE light of the morning Berg stood beneath the shower, warm water thawing his numb toes. It was summer in Talinas, but there was often fog in summer, a white mist concealing things and then revealing them and then concealing them again, like a man playing peekaboo with a child. When Berg got out of the shower, he checked himself out in the mirror. He looked healthy. Not strung out at all. He’d been using for about three weeks now, but with a couple of exceptions, he was doing a good job holding fast at his maintenance dose. These days that was 200 mg of Tramadol and 10 mg of Adderall. This was similar to the cocktail he’d long taken while working in the city. A pleasurable but highly functional mixture.