The Boatbuilder

by Daniel Gumbiner

  “What are we doing?”

  “We’re fixing John Coleman’s boat,” Alejandro said.

  Vlasic was not around that morning when they arrived. Technically they should have waited for him to return before hauling out, but Alejandro was impatient and did it anyway. After briefly inspecting the boat, he noticed that the garboard plank seemed poorly fastened. He took it with one hand and ripped the whole thing off.

  “There’s the problem,” he said.

  The two of them worked throughout the morning but there was still no sign of Vlasic. During lunch, Coleman invited Berg into the galley of his boat to eat. Alejandro had driven home to eat lunch with Rebecca and to check on one of the cows, who he said had something funny going on with her knee. In the galley, Coleman opened his refrigerator and asked Berg if he wanted a hamburger. Berg could tell by the smell emanating from the refrigerator that Coleman’s hamburger meat was rancid, and he told him so.

  “This meat?” Coleman said, taking a handful of the raw chuck in his hand and holding it up for Berg to inspect.

  “Yes.”

  Coleman shrugged and put the raw meat in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “No, it’s fine,” he said.

  “I think I’m going to go get a sandwich from Gary’s next door.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  When Berg returned from Gary’s Oysters, he found Vlasic screaming at Coleman. Daryl Shapton and Jim Moltisanti were standing by, having recently hauled out the catboat they co-owned.

  “What are you doing, Coleman?” Vlasic yelled. “The boat has to go back in the water. It’s blocking one of my main railways!”

  “The plank was ripped off,” Coleman said. “It will sink.”

  Alejandro had just pulled up in his truck and was headed toward the railway.

  “Who ripped off the plank?” Vlasic said. He looked around and saw Alejandro approaching. “Did you do this?” he said.

  “Mr. Vlasic,” Alejandro said. “We’ll have this finished in four days.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “We will.”

  “You’re out of your mind. You think you can just bring my whole business to a stop?”

  “I promise you,” Alejandro said.

  “This what you do now?” Vlasic sneered. “Now that your whole criminal operation got shut down? You come over here and gum up my railways? I’m calling the Coast Guard to get this thing out of here.”

  “It would be illegal to launch it now,” Alejandro said. “The boat would sink.”

  “I’m calling the Coast Guard,” he repeated.

  “Call them,” Alejandro said. “They won’t launch the boat. It would be illegal.”

  Vlasic scowled. He knew he had no other options.

  “Four days, Vega,” he said. “And your haul-out rate is doubled.”

  “You can’t just double the price,” Alejandro said.

  “Watch me!” Vlasic roared. Then he turned and disappeared into the shop’s office.

  For the next few days they worked eighteen-hour days fixing Coleman’s boat. Coleman helped, running to the hardware store to pick up things they needed. The whole time they worked, Alejandro grumbled about Vlasic and his family.

  “They are so small-minded,” he said to Berg. “Very parochial.”

  Berg liked the pace of the labor, liked having boat work to do again. He upped his dose of Adderall and switched over to Oxys, which always gave him more energy. He made sure to keep his dose consistent and mild during the week. He didn’t want to get too high and chop his finger off with a circular saw. The only problem was the constipation: his stomach often felt bloated and his bowel movements were, once again, irregular and uncomfortable. He tried to make a note to drink extra water and eat fibrous things, but the problem persisted. He was going to quit soon anyway, he reasoned. Once this stash he’d bought from Eugene ran out, he wouldn’t re-up. Then it would just be a matter of dealing with the withdrawal, like last time.

  After four days of work, they had replaced a long section of the keel and put on new garboard planks. When they relaunched the boat, Vlasic was in town picking up lunch. Berg had been waiting for the moment when Alejandro would say goodbye to Vlasic, when he’d point out that he’d been able to complete the work in four days. But Alejandro seemed uninterested in sticking around for this moment of righteous vindication. They packed up their stuff and headed toward the road. On their way out they bumped into Terry Strauss. He ran a construction company in town. Berg knew who he was because he worked with Dennis Lapley, the addict Berg used to hang out with at the Tavern.

  “You guys did it,” Terry said. “Damn.”

  “Yep, she’s back out there,” Alejandro said.

  “And you did that for Coleman?” he said, laughing. “Good luck getting paid for that.”

  CHAPTER 29

  BUT COLEMAN DID BEGIN to pay Alejandro back. That fall he brought weekly installments over to the house, along with a few fish from the day’s haul. Based on the wide variety of fish Coleman brought over, Alejandro assumed that the fish were being caught in a questionable manner. He suspected that Coleman was using a beach seine, a fishing method that Alejandro had practiced himself, back in the day, before it was deemed illegal. He asked Coleman if he was doing this, and Coleman denied it. In the end, Alejandro decided not to press the issue.

  Shortly thereafter, Alejandro received a call from Celia, an old friend in Pine Gulch. She wanted to commission him to build a sloop. Alejandro considered turning down the job. He wanted to get started on the sea-farming project, but Celia was offering a lot of money, and she was a friend, so he decided to go ahead with it.

  Celia wanted the boat to be capable of cruising but she also wanted to be able to put it on a trailer. Alejandro designed a twenty-eight-foot lapstrake, a double-ender, with a nine-and-a-half-foot beam and a six-foot draft. It would be a swift boat, Scandinavian in style and reminiscent of a Spidsgatter. He planned to use the leftover pepperwood from JC’s sloop for the planking and oak for the sawn frames.

  When he was done with the design, Alejandro let Berg help him with the lofting.

  “Most people hate lofting,” he told Berg. “But I’ve always loved it.”

  Alejandro did all of his designing and lofting by hand, using long wooden battens to draw fair lines. It required a meticulous focus, but it rewarded you for that focus. There was nothing more satisfying than making a slight alteration and watching that alteration ripple through the rest of the design, relieving it of its imperfections.

  When the lofting was finished, Alejandro called Uffa and asked him if he could move back to help them with the boat. He came clattering into Alejandro’s backyard the next day at 11 p.m.

  “I drank three 5-hour Energy drinks to get here,” he said. “I was down in Joshua Tree.” Berg and Alejandro were in the living room, reading. Rebecca and the others had gone to bed a couple of hours ago.

  “Why do you drink those?” Alejandro asked, standing up to hug him.

  “It’s like Adderall,” he said, embracing Alejandro. “Makes everything easier. It’s basically just Adderall you can buy in a store.”

  “I’ve never tried an Adderall,” Alejandro said.

  “Don’t,” Uffa said. “You’re like eighty years old. You’d probably have a heart attack.”

  Uffa walked into the kitchen and began rifling through the pantry. “You have any cereal? Or like a bagel or something?” he asked.

  “There’s some leftover cheese and bread,” Alejandro said.

  “Excellent.”

  Uffa took a hunk of bread and cheese and came back into the living room.

  “Where’s Demeter?” Berg asked.

  “Dropped her at her mom’s before I came here,” he said. “You guys hear anything about Pat and JC?”

  “The trial is dragging on,” Alejandro said. “But they’re looking at ten years.”

  “Fuck. For real?” Uffa said. “That’s messed up.”

  “It’s terrible. But they
haven’t been convicted yet. I’m hoping they’ve got good lawyers.”

  “What about Lammy?”

  “She seems to be okay. And we haven’t heard anything from JC. He’s still in Mexico.”

  “Damn, man. That drug is going to be legal in like two years, too.”

  “But it’s not legal yet,” Alejandro said.

  When Uffa finished his snack, Alejandro took out the sketch of the new boat. He talked about the kinds of wood he wanted to use and the amount of time he thought the project would take. Uffa examined the lines.

  “So the cylinder’s tilted this way?” he asked.

  “No, it’s tilted this way,” Alejandro said. “You’re looking straight down.”

  “And this is the radius? Where does it cross the buttock lines? Ah, right here, I see.”

  When they were done looking at the lines, Berg helped Uffa move the bus behind the shop. There was a slight incline and it was a delicate process, especially at night. As Uffa backed in, Berg held his cell phone light in the air, directing him like an air traffic controller. Once they were done, Uffa said he needed to go to sleep. Berg hugged him and said goodnight, but before he turned to leave, Uffa stopped him.

  “You doing all right?” he said.

  “You mean because of all the JC stuff?” Berg said. “Naw, I’m not worried about that.”

  “No, I mean, how are you doing? You look a little… I don’t know, you look different.”

  “I’m just tired,” Berg said.

  “Just tired,” Uffa nodded.

  “Yeah, we were working on Coleman’s boat for such long hours and I feel like I still haven’t caught up on sleep.”

  “Oh, okay. Well go get some rest then.”

  “I will.”

  “It’s good to see you, Berg.”

  Before going up into the cubby he stopped in the shop bathroom. He turned on the light and examined himself in the mirror, something he hadn’t done since the day of the Oysters game. The eggplant-colored depressions under his eyes had returned and he had lost weight. This part was strange, because it seemed like he was eating three square meals a day with the family. He had no explanation for it. Maybe he had a tapeworm, or maybe he wasn’t eating as much as he thought he was.

  When Berg got to the cubby he lifted up his mattress and examined his dwindling stash. Maybe fifteen Oxys and twenty Perc 30s. Lots of Adderall. When the opioids ran out it was over, he told himself. This time it was finally over. He could deal with the headaches. They probably wouldn’t even be that bad anymore. It had been months since the second concussion.

  CHAPTER 30

  BERG’S FAVORITE TIME TO be in the shop was mid-afternoon, a couple of hours after they took their lunch. Around that time Alejandro would disappear and return with espressos for Uffa, Berg, and himself. The three of them would sit around the work-table and drink the espressos and talk and the air would smell like cedar or pepperwood or whatever they’d been cutting.

  By the time they returned to work, Berg felt light, energetic. He always did his best work during these hours. He would be at the bench, working the wood, teasing it into the shape he needed, and maybe Uffa would be cutting a joint for the cabin top or riveting a plank, and Alejandro would be up on the loft floor, corroborating the arc of a new diagonal, humming some Mexican folk song. On occasion you would hear the roar of a sports car speeding down the 1 or the shouts of the oystermen out on the bay. Perhaps Swallow would wander into the shop for a drink of water, before resuming her harassment of the local squirrel population. If she did, they rarely noticed her. It was mid-afternoon, and they were absorbed in their work.

  One of these afternoons found them resawing pepperwood for the planking of Celia’s boat. The stem for the boat had been cut, along with the grown knees. Alejandro had finished the transom and attached it to the sternpost. It stuck up in the air in the center of the shop like the fluke of a whale.

  The tree they’d found that day on Al Garther’s property was very large and would provide them with more than enough wood for Celia’s boat. It had a beautiful marbled quality, and resawing it felt like cutting into a fresh side of beef. When they were almost done with the work, Alejandro asked Berg to go into town to pick up some plywood. They’d need it for tomorrow, when they would begin spiling the first planks.

  Birds called from all sides as he walked to the truck, bright sky, bright sun, a fine warm day. The road to town was the same as it ever was: winding, mostly empty, the bay on his left, the green hills on his right, smooth and rolling, punctuated on occasion by an oak tree or a ragged cypress. And below it all, he thought, the trap door of geologic plates, likely to slip at some point, but for now holding their own.

  Before picking up the plywood, Berg decided he would stop in at the bakery for a cookie. The bakery was run by Leonora Spinetta, an older woman who lived near Bear’s Landing. She was generally a nice person but she had a temper. Berg had seen her brandish a bread knife at three boys who had allegedly kicked their soccer ball into the bakery’s screen door. Some people said she was descended from the Lanza crime family in the city, but Berg had no idea if this was true.

  At the bakery, Berg found himself in line with Freddie Moltisanti. He recognized Berg and said hello.

  “You’re the new guy at Vega’s place, right?”

  “Yeah, Freddie, right?”

  “That’s right. Hey, he still making those soaps?”

  “Soaps?”

  “Yeah, the shampoos and stuff. Him and his boys used to sell them in town.”

  “Oh, no… not anymore,” Berg said.

  “Damn,” Freddie said. “Those were good soaps, man. I liked those soaps.”

  Berg thought about Alejandro’s new schemes. He wondered if they were in any way viable, or if they’d die off like his cosmetics enterprise. It was hard to say, but in the end, he trusted Alejandro. His mind seemed to be always on the border of madness, but it never fully went over the edge. Or maybe it did. Maybe it could. Berg didn’t really know.

  As Berg left the coffee shop, he heard someone calling his name. He assumed it was Freddie, but when he looked to his right, he was surprised to see Dennis Lapley, the addict he used to sit next to at the Tavern.

  “Berg, hey, Berg.”

  He was sitting at a picnic table, drinking a beer.

  “Come over here, man,” Lapley said. “I haven’t seen you in forever.”

  Berg walked over to him and Lapley extended his hand.

  “Berg, my buddy. Take a seat, man. Take a seat.”

  “I’m good,” Berg said. “Need to stop in the hardware store.”

  “C’mon man, take a seat. What’s the rush? Haven’t seen you in forever.”

  Berg obliged him. Lapley sniffed, began talking about how he ran into Billy White the other day. Lapley said White had bitched for hours about Garrett and Fernwood, how they had narced on him and wrecked his charter business.

  “I thought of you,” Lapley said. “You still work at Fernwood, right?”

  “Sometimes,” Berg said.

  “Man, well don’t tell Billy that. Dude is pissed.”

  “Don’t know why I would,” Berg said. “Never see him.”

  There was a pause, then Lapley said,

  “Hey, I’ve been meaning to run into you. I got a bunch of this new stuff that I’m trying to deal off.”

  He took a big pill bottle out of his backpack and poured a few of the pills into his hand. They were round and dark blue, bruise-colored.

  “Now, you know me,” he said. “I don’t usually take pills. But this shit is good, man. I love this shit.”

  “It’s fentanyl,” Berg said.

  “Oh, you know it? Yeah, I forgot the name, but yeah, that’s what the dude said…”

  Berg stared at the pills, felt the dragon breathing inside him.

  “I’ll take the whole thing,” Berg said.

  “What? The whole thing? I don’t even know if I want to sell all of this off…”

 
“Well, I’ll take however much you want to sell off.”

  “Okay, for sure,” Lapley said. “You’re gonna dig this shit.”

  “Let me go to the ATM,” Berg said. “I’ll be back in a second.”

  On the drive home, he thought about throwing the pills out the window, but he could not bring himself to do it. It was a vague thought, uncentered, and rooted in nothing. He felt totally disconnected from his emotions, from any sense of responsibility to himself or to others. All he wanted to do was take the pills. And that was what he was going to do.

  Later that evening, alone in the cubby, he poured out several of the pills on his bedside table. As he leaned back, waiting for the rush to hit him, he thought about how he had broken into Alejandro’s house when he first moved to Talinas. He had tried to forget this fact, but it had not disappeared. It had moved from his mind to his body, where it remained, tightly coiled, one of those trapped thoughts that expressed itself only on rare occasions in the form of an eye twitch or a watery stomachache.

  He thought about what would happen if Alejandro learned the truth. As he imagined this, something released in him, and the extent of his duplicity became clear. It was everywhere, impossible to separate, like flour mixed with salt. A deep, black panic welled in his chest. He wanted the fentanyl to kick in but it wasn’t hitting him. Maybe it was extended-release, he thought.

  He ground up a few more pills to remove the extended-release coating, arranged them in neat lines on his bedside table. Wait a second, he thought. Give it one more second. Don’t be an idiot. He looked out the small square window at the bay. The water was green like an apple, lit with rich evening light. But the panic in his chest wouldn’t leave. He couldn’t take it. He turned and snorted each line. This was going to take him way deep, he knew, but that was what he needed. He wanted to go all the way to the bottom, to scoop up its brown muck and hold it in his hands. At least then he would know where he was.