Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

“Who had a thing for you.”

“She had a thing?”

Rafe smiled down at his beer.

Nate made sure he could be heard over the music: “I was thinking she might of left town, right? Nothing to keep her here. I mean, why’re we still around?”

The crease at the corner of his mouth deepened as Rafe appreciated his beer. “’Member Annie Brown? A year behind us? Teaches second grade now.”

“Sure. Annie. Went out with Boone Salazar.”

“Not anymore,” Rafe said, and his left hand did a stiff-fingered hula till Nate identified the gleam and said, keeping his tone warm, “What the fuck.”

Rafe said, “At the county courthouse over in Ukiah. Spur of the moment or I would’ve called.” In high school they had vowed to be there for each other, to work it out so they each got a shot at best-man-dom, Rafe and Nate and Petey Crews, but Nate didn’t hear any real apology in Rafe’s tone, and his embarrassed sense of exclusion, disguised by rapping the bar for another couple of beers, drove home the sadness of their having gone separate ways. Petey had been the glue, Petey had seemed to have the most at stake in their comradeship and had gone to great lengths to keep them entertained, or as entertained as they could be in Smoke River.

This luminous afternoon when their luck turned for the better, Nate said, “I guess we ought to get back to it.” The hard morning had left Shug’s face sweaty and sunburned, his pulse tripping where a vein swelled in his temple, this visibly hardworking vein striking Nate as dangerous. But the veins that were really troublesome were deep in the brain, he told himself, not right out there in the open. “Dad?” “Give me a minute”—not an answer Shug had ever voiced before. “My damn shoulder hurts. You go ahead”—two more things Shug had never said. What it came down to was that time was taking its toll, and at least for this one radiant day he couldn’t keep up with his son.

Past midnight now, and Nate hoped Shug had done the smart thing and gone to bed instead of staying up swapping lies on the radio. In the ice hold’s echoing chill, his two or three different and overlapping shadows flaring in the corners as the fluorescence quickened, Nate’s boots imprinted a melting black meander as he crossed back and forth, slinging fish into the silver dune, tired enough that the prospect of sleep made him want to sink to his knees in the ice like one of those climbers yielding to death on Everest. He clicked off the light before climbing to the deck for a last look around. They were far enough from shore to drift for the night and the Louise had settled into near silence. Below in the fo’c’sle he found Shug asleep, longish black hair fanned across the ticking of the pillow, tattered and filthy, that he refused to part with or let Louise wash because he believed it was lucky. Disgusting, Nate said, but his mother laughed and said it could be worse, what if he had lucky Jockey shorts? The shushing of the sea against the hull turned the space chapel-like, and the need to keep quiet as he undressed made Nate feel like a good child, respectful, or as if he was in the presence of his dead father, feeling what he was supposed to feel.

Not that night but the next, Nate woke to the awareness that Shug’s bunk was empty. “Hey, Dad? Where’d you get to?” The deck gleamed back at the moon, the day’s blood sluiced away, Shug working while Nate slept: walk barefoot the length of the boat and your feet would stay clean as a newborn babe’s. Nate retrieved the toilet seat and clapped it on the bucket, the seat an old wooden one, paint rubbed away in a bottom-shaped arc, his dad’s arse and his, any other son would have conceded no more than a postcard, Santa Fe, Sydney, some lawless postmark north of the Arctic Circle. Nate emptied the bucket over the side.

“Dad?”

An arm extended from the door of the cabin, the hand resistless as a dead thing when Nate gathered it up, when he crouched saying, “No, no,” his fingers against the inside of the wrist finding nothing, hoping, finding nothing. Nate let shock carry him a short way into death after his father by neither moving nor blinking, concentrating on the death in his father’s face but not knowing what it was like or how to go deeper, to take part in this death that intolerably excluded you and left you hanging. Then stupefaction as the pulse flailed against your fingertips and the need to make sure you weren’t deceived by the force of longing. The sea slid past, the moon poured down, and Shug sat up sick and disheveled with a glare that held Nate responsible.

“I think you fell, Dad. Fell and banged your head. Hold on, hold on, don’t be thrashing or you could hurt yourself worse.”

In trying to get him to lie back Nate was reminded that Shug was a big man, his back broader across than his son’s and showing a distinct slide and play when he worked shirtless, a bunching and cording along his forearm when he threaded the hook into the herring and trimmed its tail till the glint of metal was perceptible, baitfish and hook coequal, no excess for salmon to snatch unscathed. On first demonstrating the technique to Nate, he had said This is sex. Nothing to spare, no little bit to nibble off. The beauty of it: it’s all hook. Nate had been what, nine? Shocked. Hiding it.

“You got to lie back down, Dad.”

Nate’s boots squeaking against the deck, the two men struggled in moonlight strong enough to contract the pupils in Shug’s devastated glare. The core of bright mind he had left refused to trust his son.

Even now: refused.

Under his dirty T-shirt, Shug’s collarbones were set against him like bull’s horns. Gaining secure footing at last, Nate levered his weight into his dad’s bad shoulder, and when he yielded his fury was terrifying, Shug gaping up from the deck with his hair strewn across his sweat-polished temples and crazy disbelief in his eyes at having been handled thus. This wrong somehow whistled up more wrong and Nate bent close to say savagely, “You’re fucked up, Dad. Now let me do what I need to.”

Nate called from the hospital in Eureka to tell Louise that she should come as soon as she could. Absolutely, the doctor was the best. Yeah, a bypass, kind of thing they do all the time, they said it takes four or five hours and Shug’s chances were good but they don’t tell you more than that cause they don’t want to be liable. He had resolved not to lie for the sake of reassurance, though the impulse was strong. Nate rested his knuckles against his brow, then recognized his father’s gesture for summoning the right answer and dropped his hand, as embarrassed as if he’d stolen something small and personal from Shug. He wasn’t sure what to do and whether he should hang around here in the hospital or get back to the harbor where he had left the Louise . Nate thought of her as knowing nothing about the boat, but his mother answered that he should stay where he was, the catch could wait until tomorrow, there were plenty of buyers in Eureka and it would all work out. He had expected her to fall apart but she calmly went on. Night driving was hard for her and she wasn’t going to rush out the door. Nate heard her light a cigarette, and then she said it was ironic that it wasn’t her heart attack, she was the smoker. Nate knocked his forehead against the wall, needing to bump up against something that behaved exactly as expected, and she said she would leave early and get there by ten or eleven. When there was no reply she said, “Are you crying, honey? You did fine. You got the boat in to the nearest harbor, you got to the hospital. Nothing to blame yourself for.” At her saying this, he discovered he’d feared she would hold him responsible for Shug’s overexertion. Without meaning to, he had absorbed his father’s sense that she could not handle things, but now he got it: she had always handled things, she had seen and understood and had been dealing with god knows how much truth they believed they had kept from her. The thought that came to him was All that fucking work . Whose? Theirs. Theirs as a family. He was astonished to the point of tears — more tears. Whatever he confessed would be absorbed and answered in this same intimate, practical tone that wanted only to figure out what they should do next. Treasure was within reach, the treasure of being listened to and honestly forgiven, but what he came up with was “Mom, I’m so dirty. Right from the boat. I stink,” and she answered that he should find the men’s and wash as best he could because he had a long night ahead of him. He should wash his face in cold water. He’d see, that would help.