The Boatbuilder

by Daniel Gumbiner

  The boat shop was a large, airy place. It was not entirely disordered but you could not say it was orderly, either. There were miscellaneous cans of turpentine and linseed oil, stacks of black locust and pepperwood and cedar, old paper coffee cups full of fasteners and bolts, and hundreds of tools, some of them in better shape than others. Several dogs came in and out of the shop, and Berg’s favorite dog was named Swallow. She was a black-grey mutt with long eyelashes and a runny snout. During the first week of his apprenticeship, she ate a dead squirrel and it made her horribly sick. Berg found her behind the shop vomiting, but she seemed to be in good spirits. In between each heave she would look up at Berg, entirely unrepentant.

  I’d do it again, she seemed to be saying. I loved eating the squirrel and I’d do it all again.

  Berg learned that many people in Talinas believed Alejandro to be mentally ill. One day he ran into Joe Leggett in town, for example, and told him he was apprenticing with Alejandro. He hadn’t seen Leggett since he stopped going to the Tavern.

  “Good luck with that,” Leggett said. “That guy’s a quack.”

  It was true that Alejandro was strange. His mind was borderless and kinetic. He’d sit down and talk to his six-year-old granddaughter for two hours and become entirely absorbed in the child’s world. His yard was littered with broken-down cars and other detritus. Shortly after Berg met him, he became interested in pasteurizers, and designed and built his own portable pasteurizer for Rebecca to use in the field. After that he began carving Elizabethan lutes. He would stay in the shop after hours, working on these lutes that he didn’t know how to play.

  But Berg never doubted Alejandro’s sanity because the first thing he’d seen was his work: his first experiences with Alejandro revolved around building, and everything Alejandro did matched, everything fit. He was a master with hand tools and his intellectual horsepower was astonishing. He would stay up late into the night, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking coffee and looking at lines. Berg would try to keep up with him for a few hours but then he’d fatigue.

  “The lines of American fishing boats are high art,” Alejandro said. “Americans are strange. We do certain things that are unfathomable, like sit in traffic. To me this is evidence of mass psychosis, all of these people sitting in traffic. But the lines of American boats are both beautiful and practical.”

  As much as Berg liked spending time with Alejandro, he felt inferior in his company. Alejandro was so confident and intelligent, his daily existence so full of life, that Berg felt intimidated. Alejandro never stopped investigating and questioning, and Berg, unfamiliar with even the basics of some of the issues Alejandro was exploring, struggled to keep up. About 30 percent of the time he didn’t understand what Alejandro was talking about, but he just kept hanging on, kept listening, like a foreigner trying to learn a new language.

  Much of Alejandro’s work relied on sensory intelligence. He was able, for example, to determine the exact moisture content of a piece of wood by smelling it. This was important because wood changed shape as it dried. If you did not accurately determine moisture content, you might end up with a boat that, after a couple of years, had large gaps between its planks. Various species of wood had widely different structural properties and dried at different rates.

  “You see,” Alejandro would say, holding a cut of white oak to Berg’s nose. “You must know the smells for each wood.”

  The way the wood was cut mattered, too. Most lumber was flat-sawn, but Alejandro would quarter-saw his lumber because it gave him more pieces of wood with vertical grain. This type of wood was less likely to shrink or develop checks.

  “When a tree dries,” Alejandro said, “it is opening from the pith. Its rings are trying to flatten out. So a piece of wood with highly curved rings, a piece with horizontal grain, is going to move more than a piece of wood with flat rings, or vertical grain. You must anticipate this. You must always be thinking about how the wood will change with time.”

  Alejandro’s professorial style was highly improvisational. After discussing the differences between vertical and horizontal grains, he might point to the floorboards of the shop, show Berg how they were horizontal grain and how they had checked. From there he might explain how there was adobe under the floor of the shop, which would lead to a discussion of California’s geology, which would segue into a commentary on the exceptionally hot lava of Kilauea, and move from there to a story about hula, the slow form of hula that his mother had practiced in Tahiti, which was distinct from the more common, touristic version of the dance—all of this concluding, somehow, with a contemplation of the cello as an instrument, its merits and deficiencies. It was dizzying, but it was always interesting.

  One day, when Berg was caulking the Alma, a reporter came into the shop. He said he was looking for Alejandro and Berg told him that Alejandro was out by the mouth fishing for herring. It was November and the herring run stretched from one end of the bay to the other, a forty-foot-wide river of shimmering silver.

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “I don’t.”

  “No idea at all?”

  Berg yelled over to Uffa, who was at the other end of the shop, cutting blocks for the Alma and soaking them in linseed oil. He said he didn’t know either.

  “I’m sorry,” Berg said to the reporter. “We don’t know when he’ll be back.”

  “I want to ask him about Szerbiak,” the reporter said. “I drove all the way out here.” He was wearing a dress shirt and glasses and he had a sweater tied around his neck.

  “The novelist?” Berg asked.

  “Yes, of course the novelist,” the man said, irritated.

  “I’m sorry,” Berg said. “If you leave your name and number, I’ll pass it to him.”

  When Alejandro came home, Berg told him about the man who had stopped by. Alejandro seemed disturbed, wanted to know what the man looked like. Berg described him, and then he asked Alejandro if he’d known Szerbiak.

  “I went to college with him,” Alejandro replied.

  “That’s so cool. His work is amazing.”

  “It was cool for a while but I’m done with that scene. It was a dead end. The whole scene was a dead end.” He picked up a wooden mallet and began to caulk alongside Berg. “If that man comes back,” he said, “tell him I don’t live here.”

  CHAPTER 13

  WINTER IN TALINAS WAS a great reawakening. The heavy rains brought out the ferns and the mosses, and the fruit orchards stood knee-deep in grass. In the hills the wild mustard grew tall and yellow, and the bees emerged from their cells to pollinate the buttercups. Around the bay, the trails became so overgrown that you felt, when you walked along them, as if you were wading through a shallow pool.

  During winter, Alejandro heated the shop with two wood stoves, which he fed with scrap wood from their boat projects. He had connected a pipe to one of the wood stoves and run it to the shop bathroom, which allowed them to have steam showers. While most of his work came from JC, whom Berg had still not met, Alejandro also did some repair work and took commissions from other people in town, usually for small boats, dories or canoes. That fall, for example, they replaced several planks on a fishing boat and they also repaired Vespucci’s canoe.

  Alejandro helped out on the farm, too, but that was primarily Rebecca’s domain. She ran the whole thing herself, growing vegetables and raising cows, goats, and chickens. Her gardens were colorful and overflowing. There were medicinal herbs and native grasses, as well as a wide variety of produce. Green beans and chilies and Zucchinis. Acorn squash and yellow squash and winter squash. She liked squash.

  Rebecca had grown up in Santa Margarita, down south. She was a strong, solid woman, her skin dark from days in the sun. She dressed simply, in jeans and white shirts that she sewed herself. Her glasses were round and thick and, as far as Berg could tell, she never lied. She was a born farmer, had thousands of different projects all over the property. But of all her labors, she seemed to take most
joy in caring for the animals. And of all the animals, she seemed to like the geese best.

  Her granddaughter, Tess, was also enamored with the geese. Apparently, last year, one of the geese had given birth to goslings, whom Tess had been permitted to adore for several days before they were sold off, to her dismay. This subject came up often around the house and Berg could tell that, for Tess, the loss of the goslings had been a great tragedy.

  Tess was six years old. She was something of a feral child, spending every day outdoors, hunting lizards and climbing trees and building small dams out of rocks and sticks. Like her grandfather, she was highly inquisitive. She was always asking questions, always trying to solve some new puzzle. Her uncles, Sandy and Hal, liked to take her out in the little dhow that they’d built. They called it the Wildcat, and they’d often sail it over to Horse Island, pretending, with Tess, that they were explorers discovering the bay for the first time.

  Sandy and Hal spent their days at school, but when they came home, they helped out around the farm, or looked after Tess. Whenever Berg spoke with them, they were always in a good mood: bright, mannerly teenagers, at peace with their place in the world. They understood that their life was not a common one, but it did not trouble them. They were proud to be Vegas, proud to go to school as representatives of that strange family that lived off the 1 and wore funny handmade clothes.

  One night, Nell and Berg had dinner with Alejandro’s whole family and a couple of their friends from town, Morty Weisenstein, the WMUR radio talk show host, and his partner, Jacob, who was a professor at a state university. Uffa didn’t join them. He was out on a date with a girl he’d just started seeing, Demeter.

  After their meal, the dinner party walked over to the shop to inspect the Alma. The boat was nearing completion, would soon be ready for its launch. Morty commented on the beauty of the boat’s transom and Alejandro explained that its dimensions were very similar to another boat he’d designed.

  “It’s right up here in the rafters, actually,” he said.

  Using a block and tackle, Alejandro lowered the boat so they could inspect it. The transom did resemble Alma’s: it was slanted and curved, cut from pepperwood. This boat was significantly smaller, however, with a bold sheer and a high bow. It was called the Coot.

  “Uffa built one of these boats himself,” Alejandro explained. “Took him a whole year. But then he and his friends had this idea to stage a Viking funeral as some kind of art project.”

  “No, Ale,” Rebecca said, “it was for a scene in a movie. They were making a short film.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Alejandro said. “Well, in any case, they filled the boat with straw and set it on fire, out on the bay.”

  “Isn’t that illegal?” Jacob asked.

  “Yes,” Alejandro said. “Uffa does insane things like this every once a while.”

  “He has an artistic sensibility,” Rebecca said.

  Berg circled the Coot. He wanted so badly to be able to build something that beautiful, but he wasn’t even close. Alejandro had first started working an adze in Tahiti—standing in gallon buckets to protect his legs from stray cuts—when he was eight years old. Berg wanted to be exactly like him, to possess his skill and patience and calm self-reliance. But they were fundamentally different people, with different minds and different backgrounds, and every once in a while, as Berg was striving to understand what Alejandro understood, the vast gulf between the two of them became vividly clear, and a great, quiet pain rose up in him. He would never be Alejandro. So what was he trying to become?

  The dinner party hung around the shop for a while, drinking wine, and then Berg and Nell walked home. Back at Mimi’s, Berg made a pot of tea and brought it into the living room. Nell was leaning against the far wall, across from the desk, stretching her calves. She was always stretching at unusual times, in unusual places.

  “That isn’t caffeinated, is it?” Nell asked.

  “No.”

  “The other night I went out for Chinese food and I was just gulping down all this tea, not realizing it was caffeinated, and it kept me up until 4 a.m. For a while I kept trying to fall asleep but then I was just like, okay, this isn’t happening, and I went into the living room and read all these letters by my great aunt that I’d been meaning to look through. Her father was a private investigator in New York. Have I ever told you that? I didn’t really find anything in the letters yet. It’s mostly just gossip. Like, ‘Did you see the rakish angle of Eleanor’s hat at the races last week?’ That kind of thing.”

  Nell finished her stretch and started for the couch but something caught her eye. She approached the desk instead.

  “Have you been painting, Berg?”

  “Kind of,” he said. He set the tea down on the coffee table and followed her over to the desk. “They’re really bad,” he said, picking up one of the paintings.

  “They’re not so bad,” she said. “Is this, like, an abstract portrait?”

  “It’s a mountain.”

  “Okay, yeah, sure,” she said. “I see that. Mountain. Very cool.”

  “Those are two little coyotes right there,” Berg said.

  “Oh yep, got the coyotes.”

  “I saw this painting that Alejandro made… I know they’re not good.”

  “They’re not great, but it’s cool. I’m glad you’re doing it. It’s better than playing that role-playing video game on your phone when you get home from work.”

  Berg set the painting down and walked over to the couch. Nell followed. He poured them both cups of tea, wrinkled his nose.

  “I get frustrated by Alejandro’s talent sometimes,” he said.

  “At painting?”

  “At painting, at boatbuilding. Mainly boatbuilding. His intelligence is far greater than mine. That is clear to me. And seeing it so clearly… I don’t know. It makes me wonder if this whole thing is futile, if I’m ever going to be able to do the things he does.”

  Nell cupped her mug of tea with two hands, blew ripples into it.

  “It’s hard when you meet a master,” she said. “I felt that way about my old guitar teacher.”

  “Half the time I can’t even follow what he’s talking about,” Berg said. “And then, when I can, when I actually understand the task, there’s a good chance I won’t be able to execute it properly. That’s the most frustrating thing, and it happens all the time. I’ll know how something should be done, but I can’t necessarily do it. My understanding always outstrips my skills.”

  Nell took a sip of the tea.

  “What makes you think that will ever change?” she said.

  CHAPTER 14

  TO BERG, THE SHRIEKS and yells of the coyotes sounded like a human party. A party that had been crashed by kids from another town and was, perhaps, about to get out of control. When the sun went down in Talinas, wherever you were, you could hear them. But you could never tell how close they were. Berg had seen a few of them during the day, while walking around the bay. They seemed watchful but relaxed, like rangers patrolling the county.

  The coyotes sounded loudest from Woody’s porch, where Berg often found himself after work. Uffa, it turned out, was close friends with Woody, and around 5 p.m. he and Berg would usually go over to Woody’s house and sit on the porch and drink a couple of beers. While they drank, the coyotes would bark and shriek and Woody would complain about this, insist that there used to be fewer coyotes, that things in the neighborhood were quieter then.

  Woody lived up by the gas station, in an area that was known locally as the Plains. It was situated on the northern edge of the town and it was considerably more down-at-the-heel. A couple of single-story apartment complexes but mostly mobile homes, parked haphazardly on an expanse of thistle and grass. There were clotheslines strung between trees and rusted beach chairs and abandoned crab traps. Almost everyone except for Woody and his girlfriend, Claudette, was Latino. One of the mobile homes had been converted into a taco truck and Berg, Uffa, and Woody ate there often. Woody usu
ally ordered seven tacos and two Modelo Negras. Most of the time he didn’t finish the last taco. Sometimes he didn’t finish the last two tacos.

  “Why don’t you order fewer tacos to begin with?” Uffa said.

  “I was raised in a home of scarcity,” Woody said. “I have instincts. I can’t help myself.”

  Like many people in Talinas, Woody seemed to have several different jobs. Some days he milked Al Garther’s cows and other days he would be weeding Julian Lewis’ front yard. On occasion, if they were short-handed, he washed dishes at the Station House. He also had his standing gig at the Tavern on Friday nights where he’d sing his deer songs.

  Sometimes, instead of sitting on the porch, they would go inside and watch Woody’s favorite show, Salvage Kings. In one episode, the main guy salvaged a large fan and valves from a mill in South Carolina. In another episode, they built a coffee table out of an old factory cart. Woody was always talking about things he might potentially salvage around Talinas.

  “One day I’m going to head up there and take that old windmill from Gary Larson’s dairy and hang it on the front of the trailer. I’m also interested in that pile of dowel rods next to Daryl Shapton’s driveway.”

  “What do you want with a pile of dowel rods?” Uffa asked.

  “I have yet to decide.”

  Woody told stories about his past but they were often disjointed and difficult to follow, like an avant-garde novel. Over time, Berg began to piece together a sense of his biography. Woody had run away from home at sixteen and moved to Chicago to join an anarchist collective, where he’d met a man named Treehouse John.

  “We were doing a lot of graffiti and stuff,” Woody said, “and we issued political manifestos every once in a while. But honestly, most of it was just partying. By 1969, it was obvious nothing was gonna change so that’s when me and John decided to go to Hawaii.”

  In Hawaii they lived in a tent on the beach and sold jewelry in town. After a few years, they returned to California, strung out and broke, their skin golden like French fries. They both moved to Talinas and became involved with a drug rehabilitation program that turned out to be a cult.