The fire started somewhere well inside the house but quickly poured out the windows, then licked up the outer walls until it illuminated the whole yard and caused the scrawny trees to cast long shadows. The sniper said, “We’ve reached an end to the story, but which end we will have to wait and see. Your little friend is either burning himself up or producing a distraction so that he can bolt to his jalopy. I can only address the latter—” He raised the rifle, flipped down its legs, and settling in around it aimed for the driver’s seat of the ShitMobile. “Two scenarios. Both successful.”
Fire trucks arrived, but the fire was out of control and wouldn’t be extinguished until only the appliances stood above the rubble and all else was smoking mud. The sniper wanted to stay and explain why the ShitMobile had Washington plates, but Howell said, “They’ll work it out. We’re going. Get in the fuckin’ car now.”
“Oooh man, I’m sensing a mood swing here.”
Howell hardly spoke, damned if he was gonna let some turd know how he felt, explain himself to some gun nut who’d lost his chance to kill someone. He dropped the sniper off at his house, left him with his rifle dangling, and drove off without returning Jared’s baffled stare.
He went to his office in the morning on little sleep, his exhaustion unresponsive to a hot shower and all his daily meds, his Prilosec, his beta-blockers, his multivitamin, his baby aspirin. He drizzled Visine into his bleary eyes. Why did I think I could help this guy, shunted from Seattle and Shoreline probation offices into my world? Trusted him, gave him my cell, fuckin’ reached out. Howell took his reserved spot in front of the King County district courthouse that some sick city planner put way out on 220th Avenue for the inconvenience of all parolees, walked past reception and down the corridor to his office. “How did you get here?” he asked.
Scott said, “I moseyed.”
Moseying wasn’t quite it: risking immolation, Scott had slipped into the trees behind the house and relinquished the ShitMobile on the theory that the sniper would be training his dick extender on the driver’s seat. Hitched a ride to Billings, where he caught an outbound dog to Seattle. He slept for a bit and checked shipping on his phone, when he saw a Korean Ro-Ro ship with a load of Kias coming into Seattle within the week. The crew would have something he could use, things that needed new owners, undeclared stuff you could drop over the side.
First, Howell was mad, then he wasn’t so mad, and what was the use. “You almost got shot.”
“I’ve been playing with house money all my life.”
“This one wasn’t smart.”
“My mother died,” said Scott.
“I’m aware of that. You gave the undertaker a phony debit card. You’re going to have to make good on it.”
“Not a problem, my ship will come in. How about the death of my mom?”
“What about it?”
“Is it mitigating?”
“Could be,” said Howell. “It’ll take work.”
They were like mirror images, chewing their thumbnails in the silence. Finally, Scott spoke: “Nice watch.”
Howell withdrew his thumb and smiled. “Thanks. It’s just a knockoff.”
VIKING BURIAL
I hadn’t lived very long in Bolinas, up on the mesa with a glimpse of the town below, the serration of San Francisco to the south and its much-grander view, the one I liked best, of the open Pacific. I was helping an old hippie with a hopeless project and getting paid a low wage, though in the American money I was so short of, plus a room and meager board. We wasted a lot of time smoking dope and taking noon sights of the sun with a plastic sextant to get a real fix on the eucalyptus under which we sat watching the changing light on the ocean. In our minds, we were finishing a thirty-five-foot Lodestar trimaran, which Miles, the old hippie, planned on sailing to Micronesia. Arthur Piver, designer of the boat, a boon to do-it-yourselfers in that day and age, had drowned in one of his own creations along the wild coast of California, trying to qualify for the OSTAR. His body was never found, but his bibles stayed in print for dreamers who went on starting trimarans, few of which were eventually launched. Miles’s trimaran never would be: we were on the third hull twenty years after he’d started the boat, and the first hull was already rotten. But Miles wanted me to build the rudder and dagger board as though this were really happening. Was it cynical of me to go on taking his money? I could claim that I was only modestly compensated for keeping the dream alive; that in the service of his illusion, I was confined to a mountain of boat-work material, epoxy tubs, fiberglass cloth, paint trays, and bits of rigging, snaps, shackles, indeterminate lengths of bronze and stainless rods, salvaged sheet winches, an old bosun’s ditty bag with sail-repair items, a fid, a palm, waxed thread, and curved sailmakers’ needles. The splicing knife was rusted into a single unusable mass, and after throwing it away I had to deal with him looking for it and proclaiming its sentimental value (Sea Scouts, 1949).
In the big picture I had not misled Miles. I said to him one day while under the eucalyptus eating the fabulous snacks and sandwiches his wife made for us—I realize now to get him out of the house and keep him out as long as possible—I said, “This is a harebrained scheme. We are building an unsafe thing or should I say an ill-advised thing that has little chance of going far enough to get anyone into trouble.”
“Sinking as we launch?”
“Exactly.” It made him smile. What a nut. I was crazy about him and his benign eccentricities. I could see he was not in particularly good health, and that helped entitle him to his ways.
“You’re so negative. We won’t let that happen. Or possibly we will press on without betraying the present. This is West Marin, boyo! These are the cards we have been dealt, and you are helping me play this hand. Nothing would be gained by a better or more seaworthy boat beyond accelerating an outcome whose virtue is that it is unforeseeable.” NorCal at its most inscrutable: I was getting used to it. “We must put our heads down and do the work before us.” From this experience I learned something lasting, if I could just put my finger on it.
Miles had a small private income. His father, a traveling doll salesman, had left him enough to get by. He was a nice man, quite erudite, but notional in every matter of living. When I first met him, he had paid for some genealogical research that revealed an Indian ancestor, very remote, a granduncle or some such, but it left him entirely preoccupied with “coming to grips with my Native American heritage.” He was still burning herbal wisps when I first appeared to help him revive his sailing dream, but he gave it up soon after. He was hard of hearing, and you had to face him to talk; he’d tried a hearing aid a while back, an advanced one that eliminated background noise with cutting-edge directional features to capture what was important. But when he went to catch a bebop quartet at a San Francisco jazz club, the device homed in on the drums, leaving Miles momentarily traumatized. At first he blamed the whole thing on bad dope, but in the end he forswore the technology and resumed his head-tilted lipreading. “God wants me to trust the ears he gave me,” said Miles the confirmed atheist.
I’d gone to the University of California on a baseball scholarship. My father, a lawyer and judge in Billings, was a bully. He bullied my twin brother, my sister, and my mother, but it didn’t work on me. By the time I was eleven I considered him a nuisance and, by mutual assent, college would alienate us permanently. So great was my mother’s oppression, she never acknowledged his part in the matter and blamed me alone for our estrangement. Working at a flower farm, three years out of college and into the string of odd jobs that my degree in U.S. history had prepared me for, I was living in Santa Rosa with somebody or other when I received a small heavy box via UPS. It contained a note from my mother: “Remember that guy you never bothered to call?” I tried and really meant to throw away my father’s ashes, but I held on to them as I traveled here and there on my old BSA Gold Star; now they were stowed in the first hull of Miles’s trimaran. My father was Norwegian and loved the idea of a Viking burial: it was t
he longship idea at its most ridiculous, as I believed that one day it would be necessary to burn Miles’s worthless boat. My mother vacated our old house on the Rims in Billings and moved to Lewistown next door to her sister. I haven’t been to her new house but expect I will see it this year when I get home. This is duty, since I’m not all that fond of her either. But I remember being fond of her.
I lived with Miles and his wife, Adelaide, about four houses up from the wharf, doing home repairs in exchange for my space in the attic. It was a modest old cottage on a lot that, a century earlier, had come as a bonus with a subscription to the San Francisco newspaper. The Jefferson Airplane had bought a place closer to the water, but they hardly ever seemed to be around. Flower children swarmed on the weekends, and the old beatniks kept out of sight up on the mesa with a couple of aged Hells Angels and the Catholic anarchists. Miles and Adelaide never went over the hill to Marin, even to shop, on the grounds that it was a “breeding ground for suits.”
Adelaide was a locally common bohemian earth mother and sometime hostess to the local poets: Lew Welch or Philip Whalen, with occasional celebrity appearances by Allen Ginsberg. Robert Duncan came as well; the only one with good manners, he also had the fewest affectations. He recited “My Mother Would Be a Falconress” for us over Adelaide’s spaghetti and meatballs. Miles ran from these scenes as from a burning car, taking me with him to work on the doomed trimaran, sometimes in the dark, especially when Adelaide and the others were “Oming” in the backyard or working on their imaginary novel, Conchita, Pastry Chef to the Stars. Sometimes I would listen to them tossing dialogue back and forth. God knows they were having fun, however inscrutable to anyone else.
One night when the whole party seemed to have lost their minds, I walked past the dining room to get something from the refrigerator. Adelaide was standing at the table with a water tumbler of wine in her hand, quite agitated. “Wait, wait!” she yelled. “I am Conchita, the pastry chef!” The speech was celebrated beyond all reason, as the poets and artists manqué lost the boundary between laughter and sobbing. You couldn’t help being disturbed, all those gaping mouths and the god-awful noise.
Adelaide was a big woman with wiry hair and sturdy feet protruding from an Indian-print dress that reached to the floor. She seemed to frighten Miles, and I soon learned that part of my job was to keep him away from the visiting artists, including the young fellow who wanted my room in the attic. Adelaide introduced him to me, suggesting that he had nowhere to sleep except the sofa on the front porch. Gesturing to the little fellow beside her, this Dirk, directing a complacent gaze my way, she explained, “He’s an actor: stage, screen, television. He does it all. In between at the moment.” She then walked out into the yard, leaving us to work it out. Dirk was direct. He told me I best be moving along; he needed the room. I told him I couldn’t see it. He said I was the only one in the house not making a contribution. “A contribution to what?” I asked.
“The scene,” said Dirk.
Bolinas then still seemed like a West Coast fishing village with the ubiquitous Pacific mongrels, the brindle dogs of Sitka and Baja, an out-of-the-way place where motorcycle gangs appeared every so often to beat people up or bask in the light of the local illuminati, who thought Hells Angels were quite marvelous.
In my abundant free time, I sometimes wandered out on Duxbury Reef at low tide, among the kelp beds and shale ledges where there were usually people hanging around hoping for a stranded fish or abalone. One Saturday afternoon under low gray skies, I came upon Adelaide and her entourage killing an octopus they had dragged out of a tide pool with the plan to eat it at one of their stormy dinner parties. An octopus has a remarkably sentient eye, and this one seemed to observe its own death as the blows of the artists rained down upon it. I must have let out an unhappy noise when I departed, because Adelaide watched me go with hands on her hips as she called out, “Delicious!”
Though I never went to these things anyway, the night of the octopus dinner I was rather formally disinvited, befitting my perceived censure of the gleeful killing. Adelaide had laid down a rule about water waste, and the toilet was to be flushed only as absolutely needed, a baffling directive that resulted in an appalling flotilla of turds, which backed up the thing at the most inopportune time, the night of the octopus dinner. As the water closet was adjacent to the dining room, the artists got what they deserved, and during a long deification of Louis Zukofsky by an older icon of the San Francisco art scene in a white Mohawk, everyone ran outdoors to get some air, leaving the icon, alone in the fetor, feeling he’d said something amiss about the poet.
Miles’s mood was sinking, and he was eating by himself in the kitchen with me as he looked at charts of the seas he would never sail. Aligned before him were all the vitamins meant to ward off whatever was wrong, but his frailty seemed only to wax by the day. Our work on the boat had grown desultory, and each morning as we began, I’d gaze across the small cabin at the port-side hull, which, though hopelessly rotted, still contained my father’s ashes. Finally, the day came when we had to assess its condition, and it was only when I showed Miles that I could pull handfuls of dry rot out of the frames that his accustomed volubility failed him. “I see the problem,” he said. “I’m not stupid. We’ll just rebuild it.”
“You’ll have to get help.”
“I have help. I have you.”
“I’ve got stuff to do.”
“Saying you’re quitting?”
“I need to get on with my life.” I didn’t want to tell him that I was starting to feel his despair as the folly of his escape plan was beginning to dawn on him. From where we worked under the grove of fragrant eucalyptus, it seemed cruel that the open Pacific sparkled before us, stretching toward the Farallon Islands and beyond, really beyond.
“I’ll launch it myself then and trust to luck.”
I knew it would never come to that. He was stuck, and it was a blessing that he didn’t seem to know it. But I saw something as he gazed at the boat. I saw hope, a peculiar thing to see on the face of someone who didn’t appear to have long to live.
It came to me that I couldn’t afford to leave Miles. My problem was that I had no place to live now that Adelaide had replaced me with Dirk, and so I pitched my mountaineering tent beside my motorcycle, near the trimaran, and prepared to eat from my old Igloo cooler with the concert stickers and the decorative macramé handles fashioned by that person I lived with in Santa Rosa, sharing what was known as a crash pad, its only privacy a treetop platform made of pilfered construction-site planks. The inconvenience didn’t keep ardent couples from climbing up and down the tree like orangutans, their love cries wafting from above. We enjoyed training flashlights on them.
* * *
—
For a short while, Miles slept in the middle hull of the trimaran, effectively segregating himself from the hilarity of the Adelaide crowd, and by the withdrawal of his private income, he slowly began starving wife and crowd both out of the cottage. I managed to rise above my shame and go on taking the hourly wage for working on his hopeless sailboat, living in my tent and smoking dope.
Not long thereafter, Adelaide and Miles clashed in court, the sparks continuing to fly until Adelaide became our postmistress. She moved into rooms near the PO, while Miles occupied the old cottage by himself, ownership to be determined, moot because he soon missed Adelaide and the uproar and persuaded her to move back in, but without the revelers, who took a dim view of her bourgeois federal paycheck. The house was now filled with tradespeople and realtors. Miles loved the scene, but I’d had enough and went into the city in search of a real job.
Representing myself as a boatwright based on my days pulling handfuls of plywood out of Miles’s rotten hull, I signed on to the crew of a fifty-seven-foot sloop built in Finland and helped deliver it to Hawaii. Such tiresome sailing with monotonous diurnal wind shifts had me praying for a typhoon per Conrad. The crew was mostly delivery professionals: a navigator, a helmsman nearly retired by
the autopilot, a couple of well-built winch monkeys, and a kitchen girl, whom the navigator, a cunning fellow whose shameless ogling had done the trick, persuaded to share the forepeak while she waited to start graduate school which she would do once the equinoctial storms curtailed yacht deliveries.
Flown straight home, we were put on a downwind sled, a Santa Cruz 50, destined for San Felipe on the Baja Peninsula of Mexico. We had just left our first overnight port after San Diego, still on the Pacific side, when we were forced to wait out hurricane-force chubascos in a desert sea canyon stinking of guano. We were sitting around the cabin, trying to escape the abrasion of wind-driven sand, when I received a call from Adelaide on our satellite phone. Miles was dead. He’d left me the trimaran. She knew it was worthless but wanted to know what to do. I told her to burn it. After that, the wind abated, and we sailed on.
GHOST RIDERS IN THE SKY
A Western Ranch is just a branch of Nowhere Junction to me.
—Dinah Shore, “Buttons and Bows”
Once a year, my sister, Emily, and I met in Key West, where she now lived, usually in the winter for a long weekend at her tiny house amid other old metal-roofed frame cottages with cisterns and aging citrus trees on a street leading to the cemetery. I would only stay a few days. Emily never remarried after her divorce as a young woman; and after mine, neither did I. We were fed up with marriage but spent the brief time I got out of snowy Montana trying to understand our parents. Once, about twenty years ago, Emily visited me there but had no nostalgia for our old home, and so once was enough. I, however, seemed to cling to it. I don’t know why. I’m still in the house we grew up in. It’s hard to picture a fifties ranch-style house in the suburbs as a ghost house, but that’s what it is.
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