Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

For months afterward they didn’t talk, but it was only when Rafe told him about Petey’s enlistment that Nate understood how wrong things had gone. He got emails from Iraq that sounded as if they were still best friends, but it seemed cruel to write back about his wife and his baby, and besides, thinking of Petey aroused an obscure and guilty sense of finality. He just didn’t want any more to do with the guy, and he let the emails accumulate unanswered.

But before that, while they were in high school, the best times were Nate and Petey Crews jammed into the cab of Rafe Figueredo’s truck, talking about driving down to the city or farther, LA, Baja, Austin, If we want to we can just take off , ending up at the little beach they thought of as their own, the brothers Owen and Jeff Jennings and Boone Salazar there already along with Boone’s girl, brown-eyed Annie Brown leaning back on one arm in the damp sand, tossing mussel shells into the driftwood bonfire for the glassy tink of breakage, Nate liking that, not sure why, standing there nursing his longneck, another Saturday burning down to embers, wind from the west pasting his shirt to his skin, his abs impressive, he’d gone too long between haircuts but he thought he looked pretty good, he liked brown eyes and it would be nice having a girlfriend, telling his mom they were thinking about getting married, his troubles recounted to somebody who cared, who would argue it wasn’t right that Nate worked for his dad when he should be an equal partner, with an equal say in business decisions, if you could call the Louise a business.

Nate turned nineteen, then twenty, and when somebody wanted to talk about him in town they said You know — Shug Dawe’s boy, that’s out on the boat with Shug. Thought he might go away to college but he never did. In the Smoke River fashion the thought was unattributed, detached from any particular thinker. In Smoke River a thought was scarcely conceived before it was presented as common knowledge. That way if the thought turned out to be wrong nobody could be held responsible; that way the basis for an assertion was clouded. Nate had wanted to get out, had imagined the friendly anonymity of crowded lectures, secondhand textbooks, girls with ponytails bending over laptops, calls where he explained he couldn’t come home over the weekend because there was this big paper due Monday. If he went home he would be asked to help, spend the day on the boat maybe, and the old life would take hold and insist that it alone was real and nothing out there, certainly no other means of making a living, would ever come close, and the fantasized Nate, the Nate who had gotten away, would have to stay gone long enough to build up immunity, and how long would that take? Shug swept an arm toward the horizon, dove gray below slate gray, mother-of-pearl cloud scrolling toward a waning sun made of naked pink light, and said Another rough day at the office.

As close as he ever came to saying beautiful .

Even as fishermen went bankrupt the tourist trade flourished. From the wide spectrum of out-of-towners to hate, Shug singled out for particular venom the abalone divers who flocked to Smoke River each August and stood around their SUVs hoisting beers, wetsuits unzipped to display big white bellies. Inevitably one or more of their photos would appear in the Smoke River Sentry in their new guise, as drowned men.

More skillful were the Vietnamese poachers whose fine-boned clever faces never made the front page, though sometimes one of their vans with the tinted windows figured in a photo with Fish and Game guys swarming over it, and their names, Lu and Tran and Vinh and Ng, chimed through the court report, which detailed the number of abalone taken and the fines and jail sentences assessed, but as Shug said, for every thieving Tran they caught, a hundred drove home to San Francisco or Sac with a fortune in abalone. They sold to Chinese dealers who, with abalone increasingly scarce, paid not by the pound but by the gram. The poachers ran calculated risks for serious money, five, ten, twenty grand worth of abalone in the coolers inside the black vans parked at night near remote coves. Within, the funk of unwashed maleness, neatly stashed diving gear, glossy black heads protruding from cheap sleeping bags — so said Boone Salazar, a classmate whose boastfulness Nate had always distrusted. Boone was hired by Fish and Game when Shug put a word in for him, and had fallen into the habit of stopping by the house for a beer with Shug, which seemed funny at first, a guy Nate’s age hanging out with Nate’s old man. But they were two of a kind, Boone and Shug, inclined when drunk to taunt each other in the glottal stops and high-pitched whines of made-up Vietnamese. Maybe it was reassuring, having another person echo your racist ignorance: Nate didn’t want to think too hard about it.

Nobody had been doing well this summer, but this morning the salmon had started biting so hard before dawn that they didn’t have time to shit, shower, or shave , Shug said, and when Nate poured the last of the coffee from the thermos and handed the cup to his dad, Shug said, “Kept up with me pretty good.” Under its mask of salt spray Nate’s face warmed at the praise; relief swept in, as if he had at last been recognized as the right son. As if they could go from here, and disappointment in him would never again cloud Shug’s expression or turn him sarcastic. Money worries were eating at Shug, and on a boat there is no escaping somebody else’s foul mood. Late at night when Shug was topside, bullshitting on the radio, Nate sought comfort by imagining different girls from high school straddling him, their hair swinging forward, palms on his chest, the fantasy heightened if he didn’t summon a particular girl but passively awaited a face or a voice. That the face, when it appeared, belonged more and more often to a girl named Ollie surprised him. He had never gone out of his way to talk to Ollie, nobody did, but sometimes they had ended up together on the graffitied boulder jutting from the weedy slope descending to the football field, the boulder the designated site for pairings permitted nowhere else, the refuge where she set about dismantling his naïveté. What had gone wrong in Newfoundland was going wrong all over and within fifty years every fishery on the planet would collapse, did he get that? Or: the tsunami that was destined for the coast would roll right over the cliffs and plunge across the field below with its bright scatter of seven-year-old soccer players jogging into the wind. They sat on their boulder smoking and picturing drowning second graders. Ollie was their school’s oddball star, the kind of student teachers wanted too much from: flashes suited her, intuitions, but not structure, not obligation or rules or any voice urging responsibility or goals in life . Boundaries offended her, a fact that partly explained why she systematically violated his, pinching the cigarette without asking, tipping her head back to exhale, comically vamping. He could not overcome his sense that she was a disaster, but this was not entirely off-putting. Ollie clasped her knees in her arms and rocked, or she tinkered with her hair, fooling with this project on her head, tatty homegrown security blanket. Faithful as she seemed in her obscure devotion to him, she was rumored to sleep around, and Petey Crews added her name to the boys’ john’s tally of girls who gave head, but Nate didn’t believe it, not this girl who wanted to crew on a Greenpeace boat, whose T-shirt claimed Fur Is Murder , who believed the world needed saving, starting with him, Nate. He remembers asking about her dreads once. Why do you want to look like you don’t give a shit? Had she been hurt by the question, had she cared what he thought? He was pretty sure she had, even if the realization was late — more than a year late — in coming. After graduation she must have left town. She had never talked about what things were like at home, and he can’t remember any mother or other family showing up at high school events. Her dad had died when she was nine, and another girl would have incorporated the tragedy into her persona, but Ollie told him no details. Nate conjured her expert theft of his cigarette, her chin tilted up, the crawl of smoke from her parted lips, but this version was too accurate, friendly, failing to mine the erotic potential of her vehemence, and fuck this, he was too old to live in such close quarters with his dad, two berths angled toward each other in the V of the bow, the iron woodstove crowding the space even more and smelling sickeningly of the boot polish Shug had dabbed on its scratches. Jesus, get a fucking life , he imagined a good friend telling him, but what friend? Petey Crews was in Iraq, Rafe worked for Aboriginal Lumber. Nights off, when Nate made it to the inn at the crossroads south of town, its gingerbread eaves laced with Christmas-tree lights nobody ever bothered to take down and its marquee promising live music, he had that feeling of waiting for someone, but it wasn’t clear who until, one night, Rafe slid onto the next bar stool saying, “N Dawg,” Petey’s old greeting. After they had gone over what they knew about Petey and how he was doing, Nate asked Rafe if he remembered a girl named Ollie something.