The Boatbuilder

by Daniel Gumbiner

  Back in the kitchen, he opened the liquor cabinet and grabbed a bottle of whiskey. He took a long pull, winced, and then picked up the knife. When he turned around he noticed that Fish was several feet away, staring at him. What will this guy do next? he seemed to be saying. He is out of his mind. Berg gripped the knife tightly and walked over to the dog crate. He knelt by the crate and began cooing to the chicken as if she were a cat. Berg had only ever owned cats and all the noises he made toward animals were cat noises.

  “Come on out, Lansing,” he said. “Come on, sweet girl.”

  But the chicken did not want to come out. She had been attacked by a coyote and then attacked by her fellow chickens, whom, Berg imagined, she’d probably considered her friends, and now she was finally safe in this strange plastic box and there was no way she was going to come out. She scurried to the back of the crate where Berg could not reach her. It was a big crate. Fish was a big dog.

  “Come on now,” Berg said, reaching for her with one hand and holding the knife with the other. “Come on out here.”

  He thought about trying to kill the chicken while it was still inside the crate but this seemed difficult, physics-wise, and then there would be blood all over the crate and Fish would never forgive him. He set the knife down on the kitchen table and paced around the room thinking about what he should do. He could call Ben again and ask him for help. He could try tipping the crate upside down. Or he could let the chicken live. This option began to take hold of him. He had never wanted to kill the chicken in the first place, he thought. That was Ben’s idea. Why not let her live inside the crate?

  He walked out to the coop and filled a bowl with chicken feed. The other two chickens were sitting silently on their straw, as though nothing important had happened that morning. “You’ve shown your true colors,” Berg said aloud to the chickens. “Pecking an injured friend. Kicking her when she was down. You guys are sick.”

  Back at the house he placed the bowl of chicken feed in the dog crate along with a teacup of water. Then he read online about how to care for a wounded chicken. They recommended putting the chicken in a dark place with some kind of heating lamp, so he brought over an electric heater and he draped a blanket on top of the crate. Fish stood by the whole time, the permanence of the situation beginning to dawn on him.

  When the crate was fixed up, Berg made himself a bowl of cereal, sat down at the kitchen table, and e-mailed Mimi to tell her what had happened. After he wrote the e-mail he began to look through his inbox. A newsletter from the hippie temple in the city he’d gone to once or twice for the High Holidays. A link to a basketball highlight from his brother. And, finally, an e-mail from Nell: the band was back in California now and she’d be home in a week.

  He walked back over to the crate and looked at Lansing. Blood all over her feathers but no blood dripping. Outside, a light rain was falling. Morning calls of birds and the bark of a dog and, in the distance, the grind and rip of a circular saw. He picked up the teacup of water and held it to the chicken.

  “Drink,” he said. “You need to drink.”

  CHAPTER 3

  THE MORNING AFTER THE chicken attack Berg looked through job postings online. He was going to do what he’d come here to do in the first place. He’d find a permanent place to live in Talinas and he’d get a job. He’d do a seven-day taper and get clean by the time Nell returned. He didn’t need the Clonidine and the Gabapentin. He’d only relapsed for a few weeks and his withdrawal wouldn’t be that bad.

  “A successful taper is like walking a razor’s edge,” he read online. “You’re trying to keep these two opposing forces at bay: the withdrawal and the addiction.”

  But he’d do it. He had plenty of pills to taper with and he’d handle it himself and not have to return to rehab. By the time Nell got home he’d be fine and it would be as if this whole binge had never happened.

  There were not many jobs listed in Talinas. An ad for a sous chef, a concierge at an inn, a registered dental assistant. The most intriguing posting said: “Sailboat Maintenance Worker: NO PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE NECESSARY.”

  Berg had never been on a sailboat in his life. He’d always found the world of boats romantic, but intimidating. It seemed like the type of thing you only did if you’d grown up in some heavily ivied town in Connecticut. He called the number. A tired-sounding man picked up.

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, my name is Berg and I’m interested in the boat maintenance job.”

  “The what?”

  “The boat maintenance job?”

  “Oh, that. You want to talk to Garrett.”

  “Garrett?”

  “Yeah, just come in later today.”

  “What time?”

  “I dunno. Can you come in now?”

  “Sure,” Berg said.

  “Yeah, just come in now then.”

  Berg drove along the eastern edge of the bay. It was a long narrow bay and it lay directly on a fault line: the meeting of the North American plate and the Pacific plate. The western side of the bay was dry and smelled like granite and dust and pine. The eastern side was more swampy and smelled like swamp. The town was located at the northeast corner of the bay. It had a feed barn and a café and a bar and several gift shops that sold new-agey wares: mermaid art and Tibetan bowls and palo santo. There was also a library, a bakery, a tractor rental store, and a few restaurants. Berg figured he could probably get a job at the Tavern if all else failed, but hanging around that bar didn’t seem like the best idea. He wanted to do something physical, something that required an able body every morning.

  When he reached the south end of the bay, he took a right and turned up a freshly paved drive. FERNWOOD, a sign said, A PEERLESS CLUB. He parked and walked up to the clubhouse, resume in hand. A family of five rushed past him, laughing and smiling, their hair shiny and blond. They were all wearing collared shirts, except for the mother, who was wearing fluorescent running clothes.

  The clubhouse smelled like fresh laundry and sweat and chlorine. There was no one at the front desk so Berg rang the bell. While he waited, he picked up a pamphlet on the desk in front of him and began to read. “Being a Fernwood Member sure has its perks,” it said. “Find out about the valuable services and benefits available to all Fernwood Members—just because you’re you.”

  “Can I help you?” Berg looked up and greeted the woman who had appeared behind the desk. She was wearing a white collared shirt and her face was freckled like a tortilla. He told her he was looking for Garrett.

  “I think he’s down by the water,” the woman said.

  “Which way is the water?”

  She pointed behind herself, at a painting of a fern.

  “Here’s his cell phone number in case you can’t find him.” She wrote the number down on a pink Post-it and handed it to Berg.

  Down at the dock he looked around for Garrett. He tried calling the cell phone number but it went straight to voicemail (“It’s Garrett,” the message said). There were probably twenty boats along the pier and several more hauled out on land. The bay was calm, the morning windless and warm. A man emerged from the galley of one of the boats. He was holding a spray bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He puffed the cigarette and spat off the edge of the boat, brown tobacco spit. Then he turned around and yelled at someone in the galley. A short, chubby man emerged. He was wearing a hemp necklace and cargo pants.

  “I looked at the October 15 thing,” the shorter man said. “That thing looks fucking awesome. They’re opening up the show. Oh, what’s it called? Shit, I already forgot it. It’s um… a classic motorcycle thing on the grass.”

  “Oh, it’s part of that,” the cigarette man said.

  “It’s really cool.”

  “It’s ridiculously cool.”

  “I don’t think I’m gonna ride the bike there, though.”

  “Why not? It’s an easy ride.”

  “I don’t know how much power it puts out,” the shorter man said.

&nbs
p; “Just ride the 1. Don’t take the 5. Go super fucking early and take the damn 1.”

  “Plus I haven’t found a cheap used regulator box yet.”

  “Just get a new regulator box, Simon. Go to Grainger.”

  “Grainger? They have motorcycle parts?”

  “That’s not a motorcycle part, Simon.”

  “Isn’t it a Bosch part?”

  “Bosch is not motorcycles.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Bosch is one of the largest…” the cigarette man trailed off, sighed, and then continued. “Bosch is one of the largest electronics manufacturers in the world. None of that electronic stuff is motorcycles, Simon. I told you that.”

  By this time Berg had walked down to the boat where the two men were standing.

  “Garrett?” Berg interjected, looking at the cigarette man.

  “Oh shit,” the man said. “Hey. You must be the uh… the guy.” He punched out his cigarette on the heel of his shoe and stuck the butt in his pocket. It was a Black & Mild and the smell reminded Berg of childhood, of smoking blunts behind the bleachers at his high school. Berg shook Garrett’s hand and then handed him a resume.

  “Brought this for you,” he said. Garrett began to look over his resume and Simon nodded at Berg.

  “How’s it going?” Simon said.

  “All right,” Berg replied. After a few seconds Garrett handed the resume back to Berg and lit another Black & Mild.

  “You’re totally qualified,” he said. “Totally qualified.”

  “I’ve never worked on boats before.”

  “You’re definitely qualified.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah man. I’m giving you a job. What’s your deal?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ll go out on your first charter tomorrow.”

  “What do you mean charter?”

  “We charter a Gulfstar 50 on the bay. Name’s S/V Blown Away. You’ll be crew. Did it not say that in the ad?”

  “No, it just said maintenance.”

  “Fucking Mangini. I told him to list it as maintenance and charter crew, did I not, Simon?”

  “You did,” Simon said. “As I recall you did.”

  “Well, we’re gonna teach you everything anyway,” Garrett said.

  “I have no sailing experience,” Berg said.

  “Like I said, we’re going to teach you. Well, Simon’s going to teach you. For now, though, I want you to clean the galleys on all of these boats with Simon.”

  He handed Berg the spray bottle.

  “There are rags in the dock box,” Garrett said. Then he hopped off the boat and began walking up the hill, toward the clubhouse.

  “Come find me when you’re done,” he called over his shoulder.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE YACHT CLUB HAD an extensive fleet of dinghies and keel-boats. Lessons were open to members and non-members but they were mostly attended by members. Once members attained certain qualifications, they were able to reserve boats and sail them without instructors. Most days, Berg, Garrett, and Simon performed maintenance on the yacht club’s fleet, but they also crewed on the club’s charter boat. According to Garrett, several years ago Mangini had convinced the owner of the yacht club, Lucas Vespucci, to dip his toe into the world of chartering. He said there were several companies already doing it on the bay, mostly based out of Five Brooks, and they were making a killing. Vespucci bought a Gulfstar 50 for a hundred thousand dollars and sank a hundred thousand more into it to get the boat to pass Coast Guard inspection. For the past four years she had sailed as a charter boat but she had not come close to recovering Vespucci’s initial investment. Apparently, Mangini was under pressure to book more charters this season or risked getting fired. As a result, Garrett was under pressure to book charters, and he resented this a great deal.

  “I can’t control who books and who doesn’t book,” he said. “He wants me chartering and he wants me doing all the maintenance and he wants me fixing Vespucci’s dad’s canoe. I don’t know, man. I can’t be in a thousand places at once.”

  “Maybe if you spent less time smoking in the parking lot we’d get the maintenance done more quickly,” Simon said.

  “Simon, say that one more time and see what I do.”

  “Stop smoking in the parking lot.”

  “One more time.”

  “Stop smoking in the parking lot.”

  “One more time.”

  “I already said it twice.”

  “That’s what I thought, bro,” Garrett said. “Step down.”

  S/V Blown Away was a large, clumsy vessel designed for retired couples who wanted to go cruising in Mexico. The boat was almost always captained by Garrett but, on occasion, Mangini hired an old British man named Carl to captain her. There were also several other part-time crew, including a young woman named Shawnecee. She wore skate shoes and jeans and she had just come back from French Polynesia, where she’d been sailing on an educational tall ship. She said she was in Talinas for the summer to make some cash and then she was heading to Alaska. The first day Berg worked with her, he went down into the galley and saw a note on the whiteboard that said, “I love you Shawnecee. You’re doing a great job. —Garrett”

  When he went abovedecks again, he found Shawnecee counting out life vests. Garrett always liked to have them ready before the charter began.

  “Me and Garrett got in a fight this morning,” she said.

  “About what?” Berg asked.

  “There were potato chips all over the deck from the charter yesterday. I meant to hose them down before he arrived but my bike had a flat and he beat me to the docks.”

  “Well, he seems to have forgiven you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The note below. On the whiteboard.”

  “Oh no, I wrote that,” Shawnecee said. “He’s gonna be so pissed when he sees it. Doesn’t matter though. He can’t say shit to me. We started working for Mangini at the same time. I know just as much as he does.”

  The boat was usually chartered by tourists or corporations that wanted to do some kind of adventure outing for their employees. On rare occasions, the boat was booked by locals to celebrate a birthday and, once, the boat had been booked for a Greek wedding.

  “They had all these rituals,” Garrett said. “They poured a jar of black sand into a jar of normal sand. It was meant to symbolize… what was it meant to symbolize, Simon?”

  “It was basically just like a bar mitzvah,” Simon said.

  “It was not a bar mitzvah, Simon. It was a wedding.”

  “It reminded me of a bar mitzvah.”

  In general, they picked up passengers at Pier 4, near Talinas, and sailed them around the bay for two hours, usually during sunset. Garrett and Simon did most of the sailing and Berg, as second mate, served food and drinks. Garrett bought all of the food at a discount grocery store: hummus variety packs, sliced cheeses, potato chips, and, if the client had ordered the “deluxe food package,” deli sandwiches. Mangini didn’t want the clients to know where the food came from so Berg was required to take it out of its packaging in the galley and serve it on a platter or in a white bowl. Whenever anyone asked where the food came from, Garrett said they had a “private caterer.”

  If there was down time during a charter, Simon would show Berg how to do certain things on the boat. He learned how to raise the mainsail and how to use a winch handle and how to tie a bowline. The work wasn’t exhausting but it was physical. He liked how his body was pleasantly fatigued at the end of the day, how his skin smelled like sun.

  Berg was down to about four pills a day, but he was having a hard time reducing his dose further. He was, he knew, terrified of withdrawal, traumatized by his first experience of it. His whole body wracked with pain, bone-deep pain, and freezing cold. Always the cold in the morning, icy and dry, as if he’d slept in the frozen food aisle of the supermarket. Yawning and sneezing. Diarrhea and sticky chemical sweat. His body expelling fluid th
rough every orifice available, it seemed, except for his ears.

  Now that he had a job he had begun to look at places to move, but it was difficult to find affordable housing in Talinas. He talked to one guy who wanted to rent out his trailer and an older woman who wanted a live-in caretaker. He looked for housing in Five Brooks, Glen Meadow, and Palomarin, but he couldn’t find anything. Palomarin was closer to the eastern suburban corridor and much more expensive, and Glen Meadow and Five Brooks were so small that there were never any places for rent.

  Lansing’s health was steadily improving, and every morning Berg inspected her closely, resupplied her with food and water. He thought she needed to be moved out of the crate, to a larger enclosure, but he was reticent to return her to the coop. She still appeared weak and he feared that the other chickens would attack her. He decided to build her a small coop out of redwood siding and two-by-fours that he found behind the house. He was getting better with his hands now: he had picked up a few tips from Garrett and Simon and he trusted himself with the contours of basic construction.

  He spent too much time building the coop, outfitting it with several embellishments, including a circular door and windowsill flowers. When he was finished, he brought Lansing out to her new home. As he watched her flap around inside the coop, he was filled with a sense of accomplishment. It was all out of proportion with what he had done, but it was a nice feeling.

  CHAPTER 5

  NELL HAD BROWN HAIR and green eyes and a dimple in her nose the size of a pea. She worked in film as a freelance wardrobe assistant but she wanted to make her living as a musician. For the past couple of months she’d been opening for a band named Carlos Carlos de Carlos, who had heard her play at a house show in the city and invited her on their tour. It was the longest tour she’d ever done, from San Francisco to Atlanta, but it was finally over and she was back at her place in the city and coming up to see him in Talinas.