Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

But most of all he remembered the camaraderie and the lessons and the pride felt by each of them — son, father, and grandfather — in the knowledge of a lesson well learned. Even after his father had washed up on the rocks the morning after the wreck there had sometimes been a sort of reprieve from Olaf’s drunken vitriol in that isolated week between Christmas and New Year’s. Now the landing hill had grown trees again, and the bramble and deadfall made it almost indistinguishable from the rest of the hillside. Even so, at the top of the hill he could still see the scaffold and the deck standing at the side of the takeoff where his father or grandfather had stood for hours at a time, coaching and encouraging him.

“You remember this thing?” his father asked, out of breath.

Noah turned, startled, “Of course I do.”

“You can hardly see it up there.”

“I can see it.”

They were both looking at the landing hill with their hands in their pockets. The temperature was dropping, but the sky was clearing. “I used to wonder about you when it came to this thing.” Olaf gestured up at the jump. “You were a pretty good jumper, but that attention span.”

Noah smiled. “I was easily distracted.” He thought, Whatever happened to those days?

As if intercepting Noah’s thoughts, Olaf said, “Chrissakes those were fine, fine mornings.”

“They sure were.”

“You should have stuck with it.”

“I often think that. Guess I wanted to get away, out of Duluth.”

“Duluth was so bad?”

Noah shrugged.

Olaf nodded. “Maybe it wasn’t Duluth you wanted to get away from.”

“Maybe not.”

Olaf looked at him charily. “Come with me, I want to show you something.”

THE TRUCK SMELLED of cigars, and the inside of the windows dripped with condensation. The plastic upholstery covering the enormous front seat was split and cracked from corner to corner, and mustard-colored foam padding burst through the tear. A speedometer, fuel gauge, and heater control sat derelict on the dashboard, and beneath it, where a radio should have been, three wires dangled, clipped, with copper frizz flowering from each.

Noah felt like he was in an airplane, seated so high, and he marked the contrast his father’s truck cut against his own Toyota back in Boston. His car got fifty miles to the gallon. He’d have bet that the truck got less than ten. Still, he derived a definite satisfaction from sitting there in the passenger seat. He thought he’d like to drive it.

Olaf put the key in the ignition, pumped the gas pedal four or five times, and turned the key. The truck shook and grumbled but did not start. He tapped the gas pedal a couple more times and tried again. This time it groaned but finally started. He revved the accelerator, and white smoke blossomed from the tailpipe. Inside, the cab filled with the smell of old gasoline.

“Carburetor,” Olaf said, grinning. He reached under the seat and pulled out two cigars wrapped in plastic, gave one to Noah, unwrapped and bit the end off his own, and finally lit it with a kitchen match. Noah rolled his between his thumb and forefinger.

“We can take the rental car,” Noah said.

“Don’t worry about the truck.”

“I can’t believe you still drive it.”

“It’s got almost four hundred thousand miles on it.”

“That’s amazing. I lease a new car every couple years so I never have to worry about repairs. I haven’t had a car in the shop since I started leasing.”

“This thing’s never been in the shop, either.”

Olaf pulled a stiff rag from beneath his seat and wiped the condensation from his side of the windshield. He rolled his window down, too. “Crack your window, would you? Let’s get some air in here.”

Noah cranked his window down. “Where are we headed?”

“Thought it would be nice to get down to the big water.”

Olaf navigated the truck up under the low-hanging trees and onto the county road. Cool air streamed through the open windows.

“It’s getting colder,” Noah said.

“But the pressure’s rising, which means it’ll be clearing up. This wind, though, it’s going to blow the high pressure right through.”

When they reached Highway 61, Olaf turned left, away from town, and drove slowly in the middle of the road. After a few miles the lake unfolded before them. “Look at all that water,” Olaf said.

“Those waves are huge. It looks like the ocean,” Noah said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this. The water was practically still yesterday.”

Olaf stared out at the lake. The deep creases around his eyes and in the slack of his chin and neck seemed flexed all the time. His lips and nose crinkled in a constant grimace, and his mouth parted as he alternated between slow breaths and puffs on his cigar. Noah watched his father’s hands, too, one on the steering wheel with quivering white-haired knuckles, the other sitting on his leg as if helping to keep the accelerator constant. He drove thirty miles per hour.

At the Cutface Creek wayside Olaf pulled into the lot and left the truck idling in one of the dozen parking spots.

After a few quiet minutes Noah asked, “How far is it from, say, Silver Bay across the lake to Marquette?”

“Well, I’d say it’s about a hundred and seventy-five miles as the gull flies. There’re eighty nautical miles — plus or minus a piece — from Silver Bay to the middle of the Keweenaw Peninsula, which makes it, what, ninety miles or so. Beyond that my best guess is another eighty or eighty-five miles, most of that across the Keweenaw, over the Huron Mountains, and only another ten or twenty nautical miles across Keweenaw Bay. Farther, of course, if you were getting there by ship. Why do you ask?”

“On my way here yesterday I picked up a radio station from Marquette. It surprised me, that’s all.”

By now they had gotten out, moved around to the front of the truck, and were leaning against the rusty bumper. Four-foot waves curled up onto the rocky shore in white explosions. They were facing the sharp wind that brought a delicate spray of lake water with it. Olaf said, “For some reason the big breakers always remind me of my mother.”

“I wish I could remember her better.”

“My mother was the single kindest person I ever knew. A saint she was. Never hit me once, never even raised her voice,” Olaf said, taking a long, satisfying puff on his cigar.

“That’s how Mom was, too.”

Olaf glared out at the water, toward a horizon resting somewhere in the middle of the lake. “My mother, she was faithful. She loved my father, God knows why. She was patient.”

Noah interpreted his father’s words as a challenge, knew that if he wanted to he could have a fight. Enough forbidden history surrounded Noah’s mother to keep him and Olaf fighting for a while. Noah pictured Phil Hember — their neighbor across the street from the old house on High Street — his mother’s lover during Noah’s high school years. There was some forbidden history. Noah resisted the temptation to bring it up. They watched the lake churning.

Olaf finally cleared his throat, spit, and stubbed out his cigar. “Solveig tells me you sell maps out in Boston.”

Caught off guard by the change in topics, Noah stammered. “That’s right. Antique maps.”

Olaf looked suspect. “Who needs an antique map?”

Noah described the maps as works of art. He told his father how he’d come to own the shop.

“What about teaching?” Olaf asked.

“I wasn’t a very happy teacher. Not a very good one, either.”

Olaf teased Noah about all those wasted semesters of college. Noah heard the good-natured timbre of the old man’s needling, so he spoke more of his own crash course in learning the business and of its strange and unexpected growth thanks to the Internet. He wondered whether his father knew what the Internet was. Noah told him about Ed, and of how the colonel reminded him of Olaf himself, of how when the mood to lecture struck him the colonel could not be stopped. Finally he said, “I have Natalie to thank. She’s the one who reviewed the prospectus and lease — she even negotiated the purchase. She’s got a mind for details I don’t have myself.”