“Excellent job, Berg,” he said, holding the jig up to the light. “This is excellent.”
CHAPTER 35
SOMETIMES, FOR LUNCH, UFFA wanted to eat a cheeseburger. He was particularly fond of the cheeseburger at the Station House, the diner on Main and Third that was run by Patty McClure. Patty had bought the restaurant thirty years ago, after divorcing her husband in Los Angeles and moving up to Talinas. The menu at the Station House was simple and cheap and there was absolutely no ordering breakfast after 10:30 a.m. because, by then, Patty had heated the grill to lunch temperatures and there was only one grill.
Uffa always ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake, which was served in a beveled glass with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. Uffa loved maraschino cherries and would ask for extras. Berg normally got a BLT and a cup of soup. They would eat their meals and read the local paper and maybe, if things were slow at the shop, they’d order coffees after lunch and talk to whoever was around. The Station House was usually bustling, full of farmers and high school students and retirees, all them sipping their coffee, the air humming with newsy talk.
After one of these lunches, Uffa and Berg returned to the shop to find Alejandro sitting at the round table, reading a book about bivalves.
“Town?” he said when they walked in.
They nodded.
Berg made his way over to the workbench and began planing a long piece of straight-grain fir. He was shaping a pair of oars for the dory on Celia’s boat. After a few minutes of planing, he realized the blade needed sharpening, and he walked to the back of the shop, to the water stones. Right after he dipped the blade in the plastic tub of water, he heard someone calling Alejandro’s name from the barn door. He turned around to see Pat the Pilot.
“Pat!” Alejandro said, looking up from his book. “What… what the hell?”
“Hey there, Ale,” Pat said. He was wearing a baseball hat and jeans and there was some kind of scab on his forearm. Alejandro stood up and embraced Pat. Berg and Uffa walked over, shook hands with Pat.
“What are you doing here?” Alejandro asked him.
“Just came over to say hi.”
“What do you mean?” Alejandro asked.
“We escaped,” Pat said.
“You what?”
“We escaped,” he repeated. “They sprung us.”
“Well,” Alejandro said, stuttering, “then… then you shouldn’t be here. You should be in hiding somewhere, shouldn’t you? I mean, aren’t they looking for you?”
“Who?”
“The police.”
“Oh yeah, but they’re dumb as prairie dogs,” he said. “I’m not worried about them.”
“What about the other guys?” Uffa asked.
“They’re sprung, too,” Pat said.
“How did you guys get out?” Berg asked.
“That’s a long story,” Pat said. “That’s a story for another time. I just wanted to come by and say hi to y’all, see my people, you know. I was over in Sacramento yesterday, visiting Lammy. I’m going to be taking off for a while.”
“What are your plans?” Alejandro asked.
“I’m going out to Reno for now,” he said. “Not sure where I’ll be after that. Thinking of heading to Colorado.”
“I know a good man out there,” Alejandro said. “A rancher and old anthropology friend. Willard Rudin. I’ll give you his information. Lives in Trinidad.”
“Thanks, that’d be good. I’m hoping to get way out in the backcountry.”
“I understand,” Alejandro said. He paused for a moment, seeming unsure what else to say. “Well, I’m happy for you, Pat,” he continued. “It’s a new start, in a way.”
“It is. It’s a new start for you, too. Lammy said something about a scallop garden.”
“3-D sea farm.”
“That’s right.”
Alejandro took out his farming sketches and showed them to Pat. “I’d take you out to see them,” he said. “But there’s not really anything to see, unless you go underwater. They just look like buoys out there.”
After Pat looked at the drawings, he said it was probably time for him to be going. Berg could tell Pat seemed a little unnerved. Alejandro had talked a lot, had explained the drawings in perhaps too much detail. Berg could see this beginning to happen now. Could see Alejandro’s mind start to run ahead of itself, to lose perspective. Berg wondered if this was the type of thing that worsened with age. Still, Pat did not seem surprised.
“You take care of yourself, Ale,” he said, turning to go. “You hear me?”
“I will,” Alejandro said.
Then Pat walked out the door and went into hiding. Berg never saw him again.
CHAPTER 36
BY FEBRUARY THEY HAD launched Celia’s boat and Alejandro had settled on a final sea-farming model. It featured columns of scallop lantern nets and mussel socks, which were anchored by oyster cages on the sea floor. The whole thing was tied together with line, from which grew hanks of glistening kelp.
Alejandro seemed pleased with the design, pleased with the whole setup, and the intensity of those few months of experimentation had subsided. He was once again coming in for dinner at 6 p.m., pouring himself a mug of coffee and a mug of wine, and sitting down at the kitchen table, eyes twinkling and beard twitching: the peasant farmer, at peace in his home.
Shortly after the launch, Alejandro and Berg took out the Darr. She was a twenty-one-foot-long keel sloop, a stout double-ender with a six-foot beam. Alejandro had planked her with red cedar and pepperwood and he was very proud of her stern, which he considered one of the most difficult things he’d ever built. She was named after Harold Darr, an old cabinetmaker who used to live in Talinas. Harold was blind, stone blind, but Alejandro said he built beautiful cabinets.
“His hands were like living creatures,” he said to Berg. “They were always exploring the world around him, feeling, seeing for him.”
They tacked their way out of the mouth and headed north toward the ARC radio towers. The towers were the last remnants of one of the first transoceanic radio stations, Alejandro explained. For many years they served as the basis of ship-to-shore communications, broadcasting news bulletins, weather reports, and other information. Their last point-to-point service had been closed in 1973 and was, coincidentally, a connection with Tahiti.
As Alejandro explained these things, Berg sat with his back to the mast, looking out at the hills. It was a clear winter day and the coastal ridge was vivid and green. Thin streams of fresh water trickled over the cliffsides, down the beach, and out into the ocean, where a lone fishing boat idled near the shore, its outriggers spread wide like the wings of an insect.
“Uffa told me he’s thinking about heading out to New York for a little while,” Berg said.
“I heard that,” Alejandro said, nodding once.
“He’s doing it because of Demeter, obviously.”
“Uffa is never shy about following his heart,” Alejandro said. “A few years ago he flew to Italy to meet up with a girl who he’d done acid with, once, at a party on New Year’s Eve at the Dance Palace. She was passing through Talinas, traveling up and down the coast. Uffa really fell for her and they had this months-long romantic e-mail correspondence and then he decided to fly all the way to Rome, where she lived, to see her. Spent all his savings. Didn’t work out in the end. But I expect Uffa to come and go in that fashion. That is his way and we’ve reached an understanding about it.”
Alejandro eased the main and began to reach toward Bend Rock. They were getting closer to land now and, along the shore, Berg could see surfbirds and black turnstones and wandering tattlers. The ocean swells were green like old copper. Way out, on the curved lip of the horizon, he could see the Slide Islands.
“You ever sail out there?” Berg said, nodding toward the islands.
“Many times,” Alejandro said, breathing deeply through his nose.
“Garrett says it gets real rough.”
“Y
es, you have to make sure to give the islands plenty of sea room. Many years ago, I got caught in a gale out there. It was foolish. I was very young. We had been out on the water for a few days, not keeping very good track of the weather. By nighttime the storm was upon us and we decided to heave to, instead of continuing onward toward the bar, where we would have had trouble. We were in an old Tancook Whaler, which is normally a good heavy weather boat, but for whatever reason, that night, it kept yawing or pitching into the wind. The seas were very heavy, the wind probably sixty knots. The masts were shaking so much I thought they’d snap the stays.”
He paused to adjust the mainsheet. In the distance Berg could hear the sound of the water battering the rocks.
“It was my own fault, really,” Alejandro continued. “When we’d built this Tancook, I’d recommended increasing the draft, but I hadn’t made any adjustments to the rudder. It wasn’t a problem in ordinary conditions, but with such high waves and so little headway, we lacked the surface area to force the hull to the wind. Eventually we were able to heave to, after we brought out more sail. And that was when the really big seas started to come. We went down below, is what I remember, and we were sitting down there, watching the sea through the window, when the boat was picked up and pitched end over end. The cabin revolved, gravity reversed, thousands of things fell down to the ceiling, including myself. I remember sitting on the ceiling, looking up at the floorboards and then looking over at the companionway, which was closed but still leaking water, and thinking that I was probably going to die.
“But the boat righted itself,” Alejandro continued, “with the help of another wave. We tried to head in after that. We ran warps off the stern and headed for the bar. I was very scared. Very scared and very wet and very cold. It was hours of sailing, and it was completely dark. I traded off with Orhan in one-hour watches. I had been in gales with my father, of course, but I’d never capsized like that. Knowing that the boat had already capsized once, that… that changed me. I hadn’t thought it was possible to capsize that thing. We’d sailed it to the Slide Islands scores of times. We thought it was invincible. That’s why we rarely even checked the weather before we went out. If we encountered weather, so be it—that just made it more of an adventure.”
They were almost at Bend Rock now. On a nearby beach, several sea lions were tanning themselves in the sun.
“That reminds me of a line from Szerbiak’s book,” Berg said.
Alejandro stiffened, seemed to drift somewhere far away, out of his body.
“Much more courage is required of the once defeated,” Berg said.
Alejandro said nothing for a moment, and then he nodded.
“That’s quite true,” he said.
CHAPTER 37
LATER THAT MONTH, ALEJANDRO began teaching a Saturday boatbuilding class. Berg wasn’t sure how successful it would be, but within days it had filled up, and there was even a waitlist. Berg didn’t know any of the people who signed up, except for Simon and Garrett. He suspected that they had joined the class primarily to learn more about Pat’s escape, which Berg had told them about, but they never admitted this openly. As a bonus to the students of the Saturday class, Alejandro was going to offer a celestial navigation course for free. He invited Berg and Uffa to attend the class, too. It would take place over the next three Sundays.
During the first celestial navigation class, they all sat at the round table in the shop. Alejandro explained that the first navigators learned long ago that you could determine latitude from the position of the sun at noon. But because they could not determine longitude, they had to “run down the latitude,” which meant finding the latitude of their destination, and sailing east or west until they hit it. This was obviously a very inefficient way to travel, and eventually methods for determining longitude were developed.
The method he would teach them was known as the intercept method, and it had been developed by a nineteenth-century Frenchman named Marcq de Saint Hilaire, who had, apparently, died of an infection in Algiers after a distinguished career in the Navy. Alejandro showed them the nautical almanac they would be using, as well as his old copy of Sight Reduction Tables.
“You know, now they just offer almanacs online for free,” Alejandro said. “I can’t tell if there’s a catch. Like, am I going to get hacked or something?”
“You’re not going to get hacked,” Uffa said.
“Well, in any case, it’s free, which is good, because these almanacs can be expensive. Like fifty dollars or something.”
“Shit,” Garrett said.
“Yes, exactly. So, in any case, I learned this intercept method from my father in Tahiti. At the time I had no idea what I was doing. No conceptual understanding of the thing whatsoever. I just did it by rote. I was a C-minus student in math, at the best of times, but I was still able to do this, because, as you’ll see, once you get it down, it’s not too difficult. Taking the sight with the sextant can be harder. Some people have a natural talent for it. I don’t know how.”
First, he explained, they would be learning the theoretical elements of navigation, and then, for the second class, they would go to Jensen Beach and take sights with the sextant.
“Now, the advantage of taking a sight from land, from Jensen Beach, is that you can figure out whether or not you’re on Jensen Beach. And if you’re not on Jensen Beach then you have a problem. You are either there or you’re not there. At sea you don’t have this advantage.”
Alejandro drew a globe on the board and then explained how the ancients had divided up the globe into degrees and minutes.
“These are not time minutes,” Alejandro clarified.
“What’s a not-time minute?” Simon asked.
“Let the man speak, Simon,” Garrett said.
“We’re talking about minutiae. It’s just an arbitrary measurement. It’s based on the Babylonian system. Now, in terms of longitude, they decided to divide a day into twenty-four. Again, it’s these very ancient notions of time, and they divided a day into twenty-four. So if we were to divide three hundred sixty by twenty-four, what would we get?”
“Forty,” said Garrett.
“No, it would be fifteen. So we would get fifteen degrees per hour. Okay, so now I’m going to draw a secondary sphere, which is the celestial sphere, and it’s actually infinite, but we don’t see it as infinite, we see it as a sphere.”
Alejandro lectured for two hours and then had them practice the necessary calculations using a sight he’d taken earlier in the day, at noon, at Jensen Beach. When they finished the calculations, he showed them how to plot their answer on a nautical chart. It was almost perfect. Next week, he explained, they’d head out to the beach and learn how to take a sight.
After class Alejandro went to check on the barn and Berg, Uffa, Garrett, and Simon went over to the Western. Garrett lingered outside to smoke a Black & Mild but the rest of the group went in and ordered drinks. At the bar Berg recognized Ben, Mimi’s Ben, the man who’d helped him after the chicken attack. He went over to say hi. Uffa and Simon headed to the other end of the bar to order drinks. Berg had not seen Ben since he came over and counseled him on Lansing’s injury, and it took Ben a second to remember him.
“Oh, Berg, that’s right,” he said. “Let me buy you a beer. This is my friend Billy.”
“Who?”
“Billy,” the man said, leaning over Ben and shaking Berg’s hand. “You’re Ben’s friend? I’ll buy you a beer.”
“Since when are you buying everyone beers?” Ben said. “You’re poor as shit.”
“Shut up,” Billy said, and then he turned to Berg. “Do I look poor to you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Berg said. “Not really.”
“Man, you’re poor as shit,” Ben said. Billy ordered them three beers and Ben put a coaster on top of his, headed over to the bathroom.
“So what do you do?” Billy asked Berg. He almost said he worked at Fernwood but caught himself.
“I’m an ap
prentice with Alejandro.”
“Oh that nutjob,” Billy said. “Always trying to rip people off with those dumb-ass soaps.”
Then Garrett walked into the room. Billy stood up immediately and stared directly at him.
“This motherfucker,” he muttered under his breath. Garrett didn’t notice him at first and walked over to Uffa and Simon.
“Hey y’all,” Billy yelled to the bar. “A bitch-ass narc just walked in. No one serve the bitch-ass narc.” Garrett turned around and looked at Billy.
“Man, I’m over that shit,” Garrett said.
“They took away my license,” Billy said, walking over to Garrett.
“Well that’s your fault, dude,” Garrett said. “Shouldn’t be chartering twenty people with a six-pack license.” Garrett turned toward the bartender. “Can I get a beer?” he said. She poured him a glass, handed it to him, and right after Garrett set down four dollars on the bar Billy knocked the glass out of his hand.
“Billy, you have fucked with the wrong dude,” Garrett said, looking up, and Billy punched him in the face. Garrett withstood the blow surprisingly well, considering how unprepared he’d been. He stumbled backward a few steps but maintained his footing. By now Uffa and Berg had positioned themselves between the two men.
“You wahoos take this outside,” an old man called from the corner of the bar.
“Bo, I’ve seen you get in like ten fights in this bar,” Garrett said. Bo shook his head and then dipped his nose into his pint glass, like a hummingbird nipping at a feeder of sugar water.
“Let’s go outside, man,” Billy said. “Or are you too afraid to ditch your two bodyguards here?”
“I’m not afraid of shit,” Garrett said.
“Then let’s go outside. I’ll knock your bitch ass out,” Billy said. Then he looked at Berg. “Dude, you need to step off and let me handle this.”
“I don’t even know you,” Berg said.
“Fucking little bitch,” Billy spat.
“What?” Berg said, stepping toward Billy. And that was all he remembered from the interaction. He woke up on the floor, with Uffa whispering in his ear. Everything around him seemed to be moving slowly and his ears hummed like a warm engine. He kept trying to say something but he wasn’t sure what he needed to say. He felt detached, like an astronaut cut from the ship, floating and waiting to die.
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