“Beautiful day,” one of them called.
“It is a beautiful day,” Garrett answered. “It is so beautiful.”
CHAPTER 7
TO BERG’S SURPRISE, THE Coast Guard followed through on its word and boarded Chico Rico the following day. Billy called Garrett from the water.
“Did you sic the Coast Guard on me?” Billy said. Garrett was down by the docks with Simon and Berg, refitting a window on one of the Santanas.
“I may have,” Garrett said. “Look, it’s been a long week. Hard to remember what I did or did not do.”
“I have six Coasties up my ass right now and I know it was your doing.”
“Please don’t use that foul language, Billy. Simon is right next to me and he is an impressionable young man.”
“This isn’t over, Garrett.”
“Don’t get mad, Billy.”
“Oh, I’m mad.”
Billy, Berg learned, was the brother of Deputy White, one of the two sheriffs in town. They both grew up in Five Brooks but now they lived in Talinas. Billy was unmarried and had worked for the county water district as a groundwater consultant. According to Simon he had a “light meth problem.” Garrett was concerned that Billy’s brother was going to find a way to bail him out so he called the Sheriff’s Department after he hung up with Billy to lodge a formal complaint.
“I want it on the record that there may be a conflict of interest within the Sheriff’s Department, stemming from a major maritime fine issued to the brother of a deputy,” Garrett said.
“My brother got a big fine?” Deputy White said.
“He was violating Coast Guard rules. Look, I don’t want to see anyone go down, but the playing field’s got to be level. This unlevel playing field is good for no one.”
“What did he get fined for?”
“Had too many passengers on a charter.”
“So someone tipped off the Coast Guard that he had too many people on board?”
“Evidently.”
“Okay, Garrett, it’s on the record.”
“Thank you, Deputy White.”
CHAPTER 8
ONE SATURDAY, BERG DROVE down to the city to give Nell a surprise visit. It had been weeks since he’d left Talinas and he wanted to get out of town. As he drove along the 1, he passed ferns and cypresses and pines, columns of weathered roadside rock. Out on the water he could see the combers rolling in, foamy and slow, exhausted after their cross-ocean journey and eager to break upon the shore.
For the people of Talinas, leaving the bay was a big deal. They referred to anything beyond the town as “over the hill,” and traveling over the hill was generally regarded as undesirable and troublesome. “You’ll have to go over the hill to get that” was something people usually said in a resigned, sorrowful tone. Some people seemed to never go over the hill. According to Garrett, there was a local artist who had not left the town once in the last twenty years.
Berg drove past Glen Meadow and Alamere and Jensen Beach, with its corner deli and its empty basketball court, everything salty and still and cool. From there, he headed inland toward the eastern suburban corridor, where the highway was lined with big-box stores and fast-food chains, and eventually he made his way across the bridge and out toward the sandswept western half of the city. There was no traffic the whole way and he arrived at Nell’s apartment in two hours.
“Berg! What the hell?” Nell said. “Come in. I was just going to make coffee. Actually, let’s go out for coffee. Want to go out?”
“Sure, yeah, I’m easy.”
They walked to the coffee shop around the corner. It only sold coffee, toast, and coconut water, and it always had a line. Today, the line was particularly long. It stretched back to the far wall, which featured someone’s collage art. Berg and Nell had been standing in the line for a few moments when he saw Kenneth, his old coworker, by the counter. He’d just ordered his coffee and he was about to turn around, at which point Berg would be right in his line of sight. Berg wished the collage-art wall were some kind of permeable membrane, that he could just slip through it and disappear into the street. But there he was and there was Kenneth.
“What’s up, Berg?” he said. He was wearing a V-neck and running shorts and he looked like he was about to go play softball in the park with old college friends.
“Hi Kenneth,” Berg said. “Do you remember my girlfriend, Nell?”
“Hi,” Nell said.
“Oh, hi,” Kenneth said, and then he looked back at Berg. “I haven’t seen you in forever. What are you doing?”
“I’m up in Talinas,” Berg said
“Is that like in Oregon?” Kenneth asked.
“No, it’s just a couple hours north.”
“Oh, right on. Cool, cool. Well, you know we miss you at the office. I know we never worked together directly, but everyone told me you were killing it.”
“Thanks, yeah…”
“So what’re you doing up there in… uh…”
“Talinas.”
“Yeah, what’re you doing up there?”
“I’m working a boat maintenance job.”
“Really?” Kenneth said. It seemed like he thought Berg was playing a joke on him.
“And you’re sailing,” Nell added.
“That too,” Berg said. “I help take people out on sailing charters.”
“Like, you sail the actual boat?” Kenneth asked.
“Yes.”
“Whoa, dude. I had no idea you were into that stuff.”
“I wasn’t really,” Berg said. “I just started.”
“Oh, okay…” Kenneth said. He appeared to be growing more and more confused. Berg knew it was confusing, knew it would take much more explaining for Kenneth to understand what had happened, but he didn’t feel like telling the story.
“Well, nice running into you,” Berg said.
“Yeah, you too,” Kenneth said. “Let me know if you ever think about moving back to the city. My team is always looking for talent.”
When they got their coffees they walked across the street to the park and sat on a bench. A woman in jeans and a T-shirt strolled past them, speaking Spanish into a large blue phone. An old man with a walker followed after her. There were two sliced-open tennis balls on the bottom of his walker and a purple plastic bag draped on top of it.
“Do you miss working at Cleanr?” Nell asked.
“Not at all,” Berg said. “But I don’t really care about what I’m doing now either.”
“You’re figuring it out.”
“Am I? I’m pretty sure I’m just serving hummus on sailboats.”
“You have to be patient, Berg. You’ll find something. Maybe not in Talinas. But you’ll find something.”
The problem was he didn’t know what he wanted. This did not seem to be something Nell struggled with. She knew what she cared about. It was part of what attracted him to her. But Berg’s experience of the world had always been more plastic, more passive and coincidental. He had never been a man on a mission, exactly. He’d been a man who met a guy who had a friend who was doing this thing and sure, that seemed like an okay thing to do. That was certainly how he’d ended up with the Cleanr job. He didn’t want to be that way and had an idea of himself as being something else. But what was he? He was twenty-seven years old. He had a lingering brain injury and he’d spent the last three years of his life working in the sales department of an antivirus startup and developing an opioid addiction. This was what he had become. Despite his near-perfect SAT score and his caring parents and the noble legacy of his grandfather, Rabbi Joel Rothman, may he rest in peace, Eli “Berg” Koenigsberg had, by all accounts, made nothing of himself.
When they finished their coffees, they walked over to the botanical gardens. There was some kind of event happening there that day. Several pianos had been placed throughout the gardens and anyone could sit down and play them. After a brief stroll, they stopped at the piano in the riparian woodland section. It had been placed between a c
oast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) and a hollyleaf cherry (Prunus ilicifolia). Berg sat down next to the cherry shrub and Nell took a seat at the piano. She began playing her own music, song after song, and slowly a crowd began to form. By the time she finished there were at least forty people standing there, hanging on her every word. She was that good.
CHAPTER 9
MANY PEOPLE IN MUIRE County believed that, if you lived in Talinas long enough, you would inevitably go crazy. They said that, before the town was built, the local indigenous people used the land for ceremonies to communicate with the spirit world. No one was supposed to live there or else they would become part spirit.
“She needs to move out to Alamere” was something people said to suggest that a person was losing her mind, that she should skip town before the spirits fully engulfed her. It was not exactly clear how and why people lost their minds, but it was agreed to be a general hazard of living in the area, like rogue waves or earthquakes.
Berg felt the myth had some credibility. Many of the town’s residents seemed otherworldly. There was Leanne Korver, for example, the local Pilates teacher, who believed in a complex pantheon of gods and was rumored to have stabbed a man in Santa Fe. And there was Greens, the son of Fred Perry, who owned the local hardware store. He refused to wear anything that wasn’t bright green but other than that he was an entirely normal and sociable person. There were the Morrises, who believed they were Venutians and who had, at one time, convinced several other people in town that they were Venutians, too. And there was Woody, whom Berg had seen play guitar at the Tavern, but whom he met for the first time outside the supermarket.
It was Friday and Berg had stopped in to pick up some groceries for the weekend: a six-pack of beer, onions, bacon, some yogurt. He had a headache coming on, but it hadn’t gotten bad yet. After he exited the store, he paused by the entrance to wedge the groceries into his backpack. He had to take the beers out of their package and stuff them individually in the backpack to get everything to fit. As he was doing this, someone called to him. He turned to see Woody, who was standing next to a newspaper rack, holding a blue package of cookies. He was short man, with black eyes and a curved red nose, like a turkey vulture.
“You’re new around here,” he said to Berg. “You want a cookie?”
“Sure,” Berg said, swinging his backpack onto his shoulder.
“I’ve seen you at the Tavern before.”
“Yeah, I remember you,” Berg said.
“Woody Taglione,” he said, holding out the package of cookies to Berg. “You’ll see me around. I work all over town. Do a bit of everything. Ranching, construction, plumbing, diplomacy. By the way, you need a job? I know some guys that are trimming.”
“No, I’ve got a job,” Berg said, taking one of the cookies.
“Oh, okay. You come find me if you’re looking. I live just over the road with my girl. Didn’t grow up here, though. From Brooklyn originally. Greenpoint. Came out west in the ’60s. Then I lived on a beach in Kauai for a few years. It was nice. Made jewelry, did acid about five hundred times. Hey, you wanna see something cool?”
“I guess.”
“I’m not gonna show you unless you really want to see it.”
“I want to see it.”
“Like only if you really, really want to see it,” he said, squinting at Berg.
“I do. I really want to see it,” Berg said. And then he added: “Badly.”
“Okay,” Woody sighed. “If you insist.”
Berg followed Woody down Main Street, backpack full of groceries, headache still there, stalking him, biding its time. They walked along 12, past the gift stores and the diner, and past the hill that had a small cross on it and the sign that said CROSSONAHILL.NET. The sun was a couple hours from setting, the weather still warm, the crickets louder than the frogs. At the point where 12 crossed Sausal Creek, Woody turned off the road and scrambled down a gully toward the water.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to murder you,” he said. “Woulda done it by now if I was gonna murder you.”
The creek down here was muddy and sluggish, thick with decaying leaves. On its banks were beer cans and candy wrappers and cigarette butts, a few tires and an orange cone. Woody brought Berg over to a manhole.
“I found this the other day when I was following a deer,” he said. “This is probably from when the town was farther north, before the fire in the ’50s.” He opened the manhole and began climbing down its ladder, disappearing into the darkness. “Now,” he called from below, his voice echoing slightly, “once you get to the fifth rung, you’re going to have to leap to the left to avoid falling down this hole that leads to… well, I don’t know where it leads to. Can’t see it. But my point is that you want to jump to the left to avoid it. You got it?”
“I don’t know…”
“Oh, it’s safe. It’s safe, man.”
Berg climbed down the ladder until his hands were on the fifth rung. Directly below him was pitch-blackness but to his left he could see the outline of Woody’s body. He jumped toward Woody and landed with one foot on Woody’s ankle.
“Motherfuck,” he said. “That’s my bad ankle, man.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You know how I hurt this ankle?”
“No.”
“Do you want to know?”
“I guess.”
“I’m not gonna tell you unless you really want to know.”
“I really want to know.”
“Pickup basketball game at the rec center. Ted Burlington went and made a crossover and I fell sideways.”
“That seems pretty common.”
“I didn’t say I’d hurt it in an uncommon way, did I?”
Woody pulled out a flashlight and trundled into the darkness. Berg had to hunch in order to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling but Woody was able to stand straight up. The air smelled like wet cement and garbage and rust. All around were sounds of dripping water, hollow and echoing. Berg could feel his headache getting worse, something about the air pressure or the smells down here. He took a bottle of ibuprofen from his bag and popped several pills, swallowed them without water.
After some time they arrived at a cavernous opening. Through the blackness Berg could make out the shape of several full-size, papier-mâché bodies. They were strung up by wire, hanging from the ceiling, slowly rotating in the air. Woody shined the flashlight on them one by one. Some of the bodies were grimacing and some were smiling. One appeared to be singing opera.
“You and me and whatever freak made these are the only people in the world who know about this,” Woody said.
“I need to get out of here,” Berg said.
“Wait, hang on a second,” Woody said, lighting a cigarette. “Ain’t we gonna drink those beers?”
CHAPTER 10
ONE DAY GARRETT ASKED Berg to help him drop off Vespucci’s father’s canoe at the local boatbuilder’s shop. They loaded it onto the roof of his truck and drove north along the bay. It was autumn now and the grass that had been kept green by the summer fog had turned brown. Everything seemed brown: brown buildings, brown trees, brown cows. They listened to the local radio station as they drove, WMUR. The DJ was announcing different community events that week.
“Folks are needed on Sunday to help weed a patch of grass in the commons,” he said. “Lot of weeds in the grass. Please help if you are able.”
When they pulled up the driveway, Berg immediately recognized the house as one of the places he’d broken into. Down to the left was the old farmhouse he’d entered and, up to the right, there were two large barns. In the distance, behind the barns, Berg could make out what looked like a blue school bus. He didn’t remember that school bus being here when he’d entered the farmhouse. He was staring at it, straining to remember whether he’d seen it before, when he realized that Garrett was saying his name.
“Dude,” Garrett said. “Look alive. C’mon, let’s go.”
“Sorry… I just… I thought I migh
t have been here before.”
“You know Alejandro?”
“Who?”
“Alejandro Vega,” Garrett said. “The boatbuilder.”
“What? No.”
“Or Uffa? You go to one of his bus shows some time?”
“Bus shows?”
“Yeah, he has musicians come and play on his bus. I went one night. Got totally shadracked. Stumbled home at 4 a.m.”
“No, I’ve never been to one of those.”
“Oh, well I can’t say I recommend it. Bunch of freaks.”
Instead of walking over to the farmhouse, Garrett led Berg up a short trail toward one of the old barns. A young man with a ponytail was standing by the door, smoking a spliff. He was wearing purple sweatpants, a purple sweatshirt, basketball shoes, and a fanny pack.
“What’s up, Uffa?” Garrett said.
“’Sup, Garrett.”
“This is Berg,” Garrett said.
“Hi Berg.”
“Sorry it took so long to get you this boat,” Garrett said. “Lots of bullshit happening. I won’t go into it. Is Alejandro around?”
“Yeah, he’s here but he’s busy working. JC wants two new boats.”
“How many have you built for him now?”
“I’ve lost count.”
“You know, I’ve still never met that guy. Very mysterious.”
“He’s a good client,” Uffa said.
“People say he’s nuts. I mean, I’ve never met him so I don’t know, but that’s what people say.”
Uffa didn’t respond.
“Like, didn’t he kill someone?” Garrett said. “In Mexico? I know he went postal on Teddy Kearns at the Western that one time.”
Uffa stubbed out his spliff on the bottom of his boot. “Well, how ’bout we haul this boat inside?” he said.
The Boatbuilder Page 4
