Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

He told her goodbye and was tapped on the shoulder. Nate could go in for a couple minutes before they put Shug under. He was led through a series of hallways into the room where his father lay on a gurney, his black hair hidden, his large ears jutting from a crinkled shower cap. Against the crisp gown Shug’s windburned forearms, the backs of his hands scribbled with fishhook scars, looked more beat-up than ever. He was not sure how he had come to be here; he was balking at the notion of surgery and would have walked out if he could have gotten to his feet, but they had doped him with something that left him subdued and lost. The heart attack and Nate’s rough handling had vanished. Apprehensively Nate took Shug’s hand and said You’re gonna do fine, Dad , shocked by the grateful response, Shug’s big-knuckled fingers interlacing with his, their hands clasping, tightening, holding fast. Their sustained silence made the nurse frown when she returned, as if they should have been using this time to say last things. In the waiting room Nate found, in a corner, a shabby wing chair, upholstery already so far gone he didn’t worry about the stench on his clothes rubbing off. It must be destined for replacement soon, this chair. Hospitals didn’t usually tolerate the threadbare companionability of long use. Throughout the murmuring public night people came and went, speaking the cryptic language of anguished uncertainty and, once or twice, breaking down and crying, for which Nate pitied them in his sleep.

“Good news,” a male nurse said, waking Nate. “Your dad did great! He did fantastic! You can go in and visit. Frankly some people seem a little taken aback but I told them there’s a lot of mileage left in that handsome old man. But who listens to me.”

With Shug housebound, Nate was able to take out a couple of persuasive Sacramento lobbyists for several illicit jaunts, and the lobbyists let some friends in on the secret, and those friends told others. Getting caught with scuba gear and abalone would mean a steep fine, suspended fishing license, even jail time, but the lobbyists basked in the risk like it was sunshine. When they went back to Sacramento, Nate figured, he’d better do a couple days’ hard fishing to account for the cash in case the IRS or Shug ever ran a cold eye over the books. He was alone, leaning to toss a bucket of refuse, when a wave lolloped into the bow and the Louise shrugged him into the sea. Opening his eyes underwater, he had a vision of fish guts unknitting in a bumbling cloud. He slid down as if he had let go of a rope and the speed of his descent scared him into kicking. He surfaced in breathable light, scales gumming his hair and lashes. He spat and gagged. Ten minutes to hypothermia, the cold already searing, and how far had he been carried, and take a breath, take a big breath, here it comes. Concentrating underwater, he scraped his toes down his heel, shedding one sluggish boot, then the other. He surfaced and the shadow of a gull rumpled interestedly across his head, followed by another wave. He strove against the cataract and lost, borne backward into a trough rolling with echoes, and despite this setback he felt his body coming back after long years’ absence, gathered and intent and smoothly useful, his soul right here too, brilliantly distinct, a thing that could be torn from him, and he wished to cradle and save it, his soul, and to do that he had only to swim, he was for once wholly aligned with necessity, rejoicing in the clear, clear light of live or die, taking pleasure in his strength, given a stinging outline by the cold, stroke, breathe, stroke , narrowing in on what he needed to do next, which was to swim around and take hold of the rungs and climb. A Jacob’s ladder, wooden rungs on sturdy ropes. There she was, a neat small craft, handsomely white in the early radiance, illumined from behind so that he noted the opalescence of spindrift within her shadow, the changeable, suddenly darkened, redoubled green of a wave sliding through the tent of the boat’s shadow and casting a shattered pearliness up through the shadow into the bright air, where it floated in a brief-lived haze. No boat used for trawling salmon had a ladder. Potbellied, arrogant, the lobbyists had been in such bad shape it was hard to believe they wanted to dive, and it wasn’t a pretty sight watching them clamber up that ladder, but now they were about to save his ass. Without the ladder he would have been treading water between the swells, keeping the Louise in sight though she was no use to him, staring at her as long as he could because she was the one known thing, the last human thing out there with him.

In the cabin, whose disorder proved it was no longer Shug’s domain, Nate found a change of clothes, his dad’s, and washed his face and rinsed his mouth clean of brine with bottled water, rubbing his hair dry with a rag saturated with engine oil. To his scoured senses the world was a glittering, reeling heaven of sensation: he would forever after associate the smell of engine oil with the shock of being alive. Elation like this wouldn’t last long — he knew even a minor setback could confound it, by introducing reality — but once the Louise was docked, the gladness was still there, and in hopes of sustaining it he stopped in at the Harbor Cafe on the wharf. Leaning back in his booth, he greeted the approach of the waitress with a smile inspired more by his own exhilaration than by her familiarity, and this smile, which wasn’t about her, which suggested a rowdy, causeless pleasure in being alive, caught her off guard. Her hair was a blond ponytail falling not down her back but across her shoulder, as if she’d drawn it forward to show off its length. She had something in her left eye, and the compulsive blinking made her feel ridiculous. In her distraction she lost his name and sought it in a quick inner stammer of guesses. Blinking, she poured coffee into the cup he nudged forward, and he beat her to it. “Ollie.”

Then he said something she was never to understand. He said, “There you are.”

It wasn’t Shug’s heart that gave out, it was Louise’s, in her sleep. Peaceful , people said, and Such luck she lived long enough to hold the baby .

Nate and Ollie and the baby lived in a trailer set on cinder-blocks behind the house that was now Shug’s alone, in a yard knee-deep in thistles and sorrel and wild radish that Ollie resolved every spring to turn into an organic garden, but before they knew it it was midsummer and that plan, like their others, withered into bemused postponement. Sometimes it was Ollie who said wearily Look at this place , sometimes it was Nate, coming home exhausted and hoping for some gesture from her that would compensate for his frustration and the weirdness of having to pay rent to his own father and his fear that he would never get them out of this trailer into a real house. Where had it gone, the scruffy dreadlocked rebelliousness of that girl on the boulder? If she was tamed, was she even the same girl? They were trapped; the future was closing down fast and soon would shut them out altogether. Up to her to convince him otherwise, to reason with, comfort, and inspire him, but how? He said (and regretted it during the saying) that there must have been a time when the prospect of giving him a blow job didn’t turn her stomach. At that, the girl on the boulder would have turned on him the Medusa glare of murderous feminism, but she was gone. In a clearing in the trailer’s mess the baby sat and blinked and sucked, muzzled by his binkie. It got so the only time they heard each other laugh was when they hunkered down to baby level and adopted funny voices, playing roles they had somehow assigned each other, Nate a talking bear with a hankering for pie, Ollie a vain, dim-witted fairy. Before long their friends with kids started to shake their heads. Indulge that baby’s every wish, let him think your lives revolve around him, and you’re creating a monster : such was the advice directed at Nate and Ollie, who shrugged and smiled. I pity you two guys , Rafe announced one stoned midnight when Ollie and Nate both jumped up at a bad-dream whimper from the bedroom, if it ever comes to working out joint custody. Rafe didn’t have a big mouth usually, but Nate kicked him out for that remark and volunteered, because Ollie was crying, that Rafe was an asshole and jealous besides, and what had happened to Rafe and Annie was never going to happen to them. Which only made Ollie set her two fists against her face, her elbows poked out as if she wanted to punch her own eyes.