by G. M. Ford
locally renowned as an impeccable judge of character, had seen something in me even when I was a child that had inspired him to reach from the grave to save me from myself. His efforts had not been in vain. Despite the best efforts of my ex-wife's team of lawyers, the draconian complexity of my trust fund had managed to thwart even Washington's hellish community-property laws. To Annette's everlasting chagrin, my prospects remained intact.
In spite of this, however, some compensatory function of impending middle age was beginning to worm its way into my consciousness. I was starting to have visions of spending my declining years with the Boys, down in the vicinity of Pioneer Square, debating the body and bouquet of fortified wine with the other denizens of the district.
Fortunately, I was spared this moral dilemma. The phone tinkled. I swallowed half the schooner of Chimay, wiped off my upper lip, and picked it up.
"Leo, jew chit. I seen you come in. How you doin'?"
It was Hector Guiterrez, the superintendent of my building. Hector looked out for things around the apartment when I was gone. An expatriate Cuban whose attitude toward the regime had earned him several years in one of Castro's more colorful prisons, Hector harbored a deep, abiding distrust of all authority figures. As my job tended to bring me into constant conflict with a wide assortment of officialdom, Hector had unilaterally adopted me as a fellow conspirator. I'd never been totally clear as to whom we were conspiring against or to what ends, but it seemed to make Hector happy, which was good enough for me. Off the pig. It was us against the world.
"Glad to be home, Hector. Thanks for watering the plants."
"No problem, Leo. The people we got to steek togeder. Jew know what I mean?" I offered that I did.
"How'd eet go? Jew was gone a long time."
"You don't want to know," I said.
"Somebody been looooking for jew." He hesitated. "A wooooman." He breathed. I was supposed to guess now.
"Rebecca?" I ventured.
"A beeg woooman. Muy . . . muy . . ."
What followed was a series of rough glottal noises, the origin and timbre of which made me yearn for a hot shower. He sensed my impatience.
"She come back tree, four times, Finally I took a note from her. Tole her I geev it to jew when jew get back. Eets on toppa de fridge."
"Thanks again Hector. Anything else?"
"Jour lawyer, he called me looking for jew. Said jew gave heem my nomber for 'mergency. Two maybe tree days ago. And"—favoring his flair for the dramatic, he let it hang ominously—"a couple of dose bums of jours was around. The one wid da wood coat and the real dumb one. Jew got to keep dem away from here, Leo. The odder tenants dey go batshit eberytime dey see dose guys. De Harrisons, in 4C, dose fokkers, dey called the corporation and beetched. You tell 'em to stay away, okay, Leo?"
"I'll tell them again, Hector. Sorry about that."
Hector was referring to what I affectionately call "the Boys." When I need a couple pairs of extra ears or eyes, I hire the Boys. Rebecca occasionally groused that referring to a group of grown men, none of whom was under sixty, as the Boys was a slur, but I knew better. The Boys didn't mind. In one capacity or another, they'd all known my old man and, as such, had been counted among my many "uncles."
Twelve terms on the city council had ensured that my old man was among the city's most well-known characters. Three half-hearted runs at the mayor's office, particularly the one when, clad in a red tuxedo, he'd campaigned from atop a spewing beer wagon, had lifted his status to legend. Through it all, however, he'd never lost the common touch. He never forgot his old friends—that collection of drunks and reprobates he'd started out with down on the mud flats, those who sobered up every four years or so for just long enough to vote for him again. Wild Bill Waterman always kept a place in his heart and a little cash in his pocket for a guy who was down on his luck.
Among my most cherished memories are those of being awakened late at night by muffled conversation and laughter, of sneaking down the back stairs that led to the kitchen, my mother's threats humming in my ears, of finding ragged, red-faced men who smelled of dust and desperation sitting around our kitchen table, dripping water on the black-and-white tile floor, dipping snuff and sipping whiskey. Even then they'd been relegated to the back kitchen. Unlike my father, my mother took her social position quite seriously and had, in stages, eventually banned these so-called "uncles" from her house.
The Boys were the last remnants of another era, my last tie to my old man. When sober, they made excellent operatives. The old and poor are invisible. They can hang around forever without attracting attention. They operate inside their own little force fields, which direct the regular citizenry away from them like incompatible magnetic poles.
Of the originals, only George, Harold, and Ralph were still around. Buddy Knox had gotten himself killed on what I'd foolishly presumed was a routine surveillance. I was resigned that guilt was a major reason why I always tried to keep the Boys busy, even when I didn't particularly need the help.
To everyone's amazement, Buddy had left the other three enough of an insurance settlement for them to put a down payment on the rooming house in which
they'd all shared a single, large room. Combined, their meager pensions provided just enough cash to pay for booze and utilities. No problem. They took up the slack with a combination of money they made working for me, panhandling, and an artful collection of insurance scams.
Since Buddy's death, they'd used the house as a makeshift shelter for the homeless. Neither their neighbors on Franklin nor the authorities were amused. Faced with a withering volley of suits and injunctions, the Boys had turned to me. I, in turn, had passed them on to my attorney, Jed James, who, while way out of their financial league, was such a lover of underdogs and lost causes that he'd seemed a natural. His approach was to meet salvo with salvo. Thus far, he'd kept the powers that be at bay with a veritable hail of writs and show-cause orders. Privately, he'd confided to me that it was just a matter of time before the authorities had their way. Perhaps that explained why Jed had been looking so hard for me and why the Boys, in spite of instructions to the contrary, had been around.
"There's a new Chucho Valdez CD." Hector interrupted my thoughts. In addition to conspiracy, Hector and I also shared a love of jazz, particularly the Afro-Cuban variety. Burro notwithstanding, without Hector and his embargo-defying relatives in Miami, I wouldn't have know Chucho Valdez from Juan Valdez.
"Make me a tape."
"Chewer. Jew tell dem bums. Okay, Leo?" "Okay, Hector. Later."
The answering machine yielded several calls from Jed, a heartwrenching potential employment opportunity that involved finding a lost dog—Muffy, I believe it was—and the usual collection of telemarketing schemes that besmirch the airways these days.
I wandered over to the refrigerator and pulled the
note off the top. The pressure of my hand ploughed a furrow in the collected grease and grime. I reckoned somebody needed to clean off the top of the fridge. There was printing on one side of the torn-in-half piece of blue paper. Scrawled on the unprinted side, the message was brief.
Heck needs you. He's in Swedish. Room 222.
Marge.
Henry "Heck" Sundstrom was a major supporting player in the movie of my life. During my high school years, I'd worked three winters on Heck's commercial fishing boat, the Lady Day—a jet-black Limit Seiner, fifty-eight feet with a nineteen-foot beam, built and rigged to spend six months a year seining the obsidian waters of the Bering Strait for salmon and black cod and six months being scraped, painted, and refitted in preparation for another season.
When the Lady Day hit the dock in early September every year, Rudy and Angel were on their way south before the diesel fumes had settled. They were fishermen. Refitting was beneath their dignity. That was a job for a kid. My old man, as usual, knew somebody who knew somebody who knew Heck. It was the hardest work I'd ever done and the best time I'd ever spent. I dreamed of the days ahead when I'd b
e able to prove myself worthy of going fishing. While my mother was dreaming of law school, I was dreaming of ling cod.
Heck was a third-generation Seattle fisherman. With an uncanny combination of luck, hard work, and business sense he'd parlayed the mortgage on his grandfather's hand-built wooden fifty-two footer into the Lady Day, a paid-for, half-million-dollar, state-of-the-art vessel whose staunch steel sides and cozy top-house gave a man the courage to once again risk the hard northern waters for profit.
He'd been unmarried then, seemingly a lifetime
bachelor. A man's man, he answered to no one. He'd lived on board, playing host to an ever-changing assortment of waterfront characters who'd stop by for a drink or two, disappear for a month, and then suddenly return to find the party more or less where they'd left it.
In those days, the air displacement of his physical presence seemed to bob lesser men about. I'd stay aboard on Friday and Saturday nights when the perpetual party, after enough booze and testosterone, sometimes degenerated into round-robin arm-wrestling sessions. I'd watch in amazement as Heck, his massive arm steady as a rock, would casually make small talk with onlookers while larger opponents, their faces beet-red, streaked with sweat, their bodies shaking with the strain, failed to move him an inch. When the desire moved him, he'd put them down in a single swift movement without ever interrupting the patter.
He was everything I could imagine a man wanting to be. Unlike my old man, who was forever moving and shaking behind the scenes, Heck grappled directly with reality and won. He was my hero. In those days, we didn't have role models yet. He'd seemed untouchable, somehow destined to forever continue his yearly migration to the sea, to the party and back.
Destiny went into the dumpster the moment Marge sashayed onto Dock 2 that day in early October more than twenty-three years ago. She was about twenty-two or so, not too many years my senior, and ripe in a way usually limited to a tropical fruit. Her family was visiting old Mel, who ran Lubber, the greasy spoon at the marina. Over six feet, she was nearly as big as Heck and put together in a package of truly fearful symmetry. On other women, the simple blue frock was just a house dress for ironing or a quick trip to the market: on Marge it was neon. The image of her that
day, thick auburn hair backlit by the late-afternoon sun, seemingly on fire, is still burned somewhere on my retinas.
As she ambled down the dock fully aware of her effect yet profoundly disinterested, jaws gaped; the daily tasks of rerigging and cleaning up, so essential to boat maintenance, stopped dead on every craft she passed. I gawked with the others, filled with an odd mixture of excitement and anxiety, as if one of my fevered adolescent dreams had finally arrived, only to find me withered and wanting. Martin Henry, who kept the Mary B in the slip next to Heck's, later confided to me that he'd been fixing a rope end while gawking at Marge that day and had nearly severed his thumb. Like me, he still carries the scar.
In all the years since that day, I've never seen it again. As a matter of fact, if it weren't for that single moment, I wouldn't believe it at all. I'd figure it was just the exaggerated way people remember their pasts so that their lives will seem to have more drama and less sadness. I'd have been wrong. It was love at first sight. From three boats away, Marge and Heck honed in on one another like a couple of hormonally guided missiles. At first, I thought it was me she was looking at and was instantly lifted. Luckily, before I could make an ass of myself, Heck eased me aside. To this day, I'm convinced that anyone stepping between them at the precise moment when their eyes met would surely have been killed by the combined power of their gazes. In that single moment, Heck knew that life as he had known it was over. I knew that he knew. Marge knew that we both knew.
Rudy, Angel, and I found that our services were no longer required. Within a week, Heck was without crew. It wasn't just us either. The party was just plain over. Boarders were summarily repelled. The Lady Day gave up her berth on Dock 2, a Sundstrom stronghold for nearly forty years, and moved down to
Dock 7, the nominal line of demarcation between the commercial and the gentlemen fishermen, a more civilized environ where tourists could stroll the docks on weekends without fear of so much as smudging their togs, let alone taking a broom support in the melon.
Marge, in spite of her limited years, was a woman who knew what she wanted. Instead of trying to melt herself amiably into the maze of Heck's past life and acquaintances, she'd simply started his life over for him. She kept his old friends at a distance. On those occasions when Heck and I got together after they were married, I could sense her impatience with any story that had transpired before she'd walked into his life. She'd immediately redirect the conversation to the present, as if the thirty-odd years of his past had merely been a prolonged prelude to her arrival. One by one, she'd phased us out. Surprisingly, Heck didn't seem to mind; obviously, she was all he needed. God, how I'd hated her back then.
Within five years she'd gotten him off the boat and into wholesale. Fleets of Sea Sundstrom vans now supplied local restaurants with the fresh fish for which they were so justly famous.
They had also had a son. Over the years, I'd seen the newly prominent Sundstroms in the paper once in a while. Maybe it was my imagination, but Heck always looked vaguely uncomfortable and strangely out of place. Marge, to my great annoyance, looked good even in newsprint. The kid, Nick I think it was, had turned out to be a pretty good halfback for Ballard High. Rumor had it that Heck shared his success with a number of worthy causes. I thought back to the last time I'd seen him.
I'd spied on him, across the packed room, at a fundraiser for the families of those lost at sea. This was six or seven years ago. Instinctively, I'd squirmed and shouldered my way through the crowd to his side.
Without thinking, we'd embraced, the intervening years instantly evaporating. His face cracked with an idiotic grin, he grasped me by both shoulders and held me off the ground at arm's length as if I were a doll. Before either of us had time to speak, the sea of humanity suddenly parted and Marge, more stunning than ever, appeared at his side, smiling that smile. She had someone for Heck to meet. So nice to see me again. She took him by the elbow. Heck barely had time for a quick look over his shoulder as they melted into the melee. It was a moment of such encompassing awkwardness that it resurfaced, fresh and hot on my face, every time I thought about Heck Sundstrom, which was more often than I would have chosen.
I leaned back against the fridge. Scraping the sludge off the printed side of the note, I could just make out what it had once been. It was a final notice from Puget Power. They wanted their three hundred seventy-four dollars and twelve cents, and they wanted it by last Friday.
3
Swedish Hospital squats at the apex of Pill Hill, the blond cement of her estimable girth warding off all challengers for that most lofty section of lower Broadway that has, over the past decade, evolved into the medical epicenter of the city. Not surprisingly, the presence of five major hospitals in a couple of square miles has spawned multifarious schools of specialists and technologists who hover and dart about the neighborhood, always alert for bigger, better office space, eager to bill, ever ready to snap up any crumbs that might float from the mouths of the great beasts. Whether medical services have improved is a matter of great debate; that parking has gone to shit is without question.
Unable to find anything legal on either Minor or Colombia, I wound down the hill toward Boren, getting lucky, finding a space on the shady side of St. James Cathedral, half a block uphill from O'Dea High School.
Any vestige of morning fog had been swept aside by the earthy breezes of Indian summer. The uphill walk, padded by the first red maple leaves of the season, was enough to raise beads of sweat on my forehead. I skirted piles of sand, rebar, and wire mesh, the remnants of the ongoing state of siege that the unending construction left in its wake. I found a side door.
I didn't see him at first. In the hard hospital bed, he looked small, inanimate, and out of place. Several tufts of blond hair,
mostly gone gray at the center, had somehow wriggled free of the mummy-like bandages covering most of his head. His left hand, reddened and clenched like an oak burl atop the covers, sprouted a plastic IV tube that was anchored in place by yet another maze of tape. He was alone. I walked to the foot of the bed and plucked his chart from the built-in receptacle.
I was lost in the scribbles when he stirred, tightening his body, seemingly attempting to sit up. I slid around to his left side and put a hand on his shoulder. The touch seemed to comfort him. He relaxed again, smoothing the deep lines of his forehead, sending the blood back around the system, again making visible the network of fine pink capillaries that hatched his nearly translucent skin.
"He sat up twice yesterday. They say it's just muscle contractions."
Marge stood half-in, half-out of the door, her right arm braced on the beige wall. She wore a thick forest-green turtleneck sweater, a shade darker than her eyes, blue jeans, and what looked to be python cowboy boots. Large gold hoop earrings diverted attention from the gray in her thick hair. She wasn't twenty anymore. No sir—to my eye, at least, she looked a whole lot better than that. Nature, with uncommon kindness, provides most of us with a rationalized scale of beauty, a balanced image in keeping with our stations of life. Unlike Tony Moldonado, most of us manage to surmount the aching for buxom airbrushed cheerleaders and find ourselves one day mercifully able to envision strength of character in a facial line or two and intellectual weight in the slight sag of a breast. By synchronizing that which is possible with that which is desired,
nature both ensures the survival of the species and keeps the costs down.
I waved the chart. "I was . . . trying to . . ."
"He's stable. That's all they'll say."
"Stable means?"
"Stable means, he's got a severe skull fracture and two broken legs but is in no immediate danger of dying. Whether or not he's going to stay like this or for how long is anybody's guess."
