When I return to the deck, Sal is wide awake, weaving the shuttle through the web, humming a ditty. “Said, ‘Get flares,’ ” he tells me, “not, ‘Fuck off for the afternoon.’ ”
“I been back an hour,” I say.
“Bet you can screw an hour too,” says Sal.
He holds up the net for me to see. Last night, on the flats off Sausalito, we snagged a boulder. The gash it made was big enough to step through. “Unmendable,” I declared. Now I wish I hadn’t. Somehow, Sal has restored the ravaged mesh to a near-perfect grid: the diamonds all proportionate, the knots small and tight.
“Mendable,” he says.
I change the subject. “The Buds are barbecuing.”
Sal shows no response. It happens more and more, that. Each time, I am less sure he’s just ignoring me.
“The Buds are barbecuing!” I shout.
“Christ. I’m right here.”
“We’re invited.”
Sal harrumphs. “I’m doing mac and gravy.”
On the Barbara, almost every night is mac-and-gravy night. Sal acts as if his is a secret family recipe, preserved from the Old Country. In fact, the macaroni is regular Barilla pasta, the gravy a liquidy blend of canned tomatoes, garlic, sugar.
“A pinch of sugar,” Sal has said on more than one occasion. “That’s what you’re tasting.”
My first season, when I made the mistake of tossing the tomato can after emptying it into the pot, Sal found it in the trash, filled it with water, and held it out for me to see. Inside was pinkish fluid.
“Gravy,” Sal said.
After we eat, I haul up a gallon of bay water and wash the dishes. Suddenly, it’s time. Sal starts the engine, I unwrap the breast lines, and we idle from the slip. A few tourists, having strayed from the attractions of Fisherman’s Wharf, take pictures from the pier. Soon we are beyond the seawall and can feel the wind.
—
I met Sal shortly after I returned to San Francisco. I say return. I’m not from there. I’d only lived there briefly, with a girl who was, before they attacked us and I volunteered. (I say they attacked us and I volunteered. The one didn’t cause the other.) Still, when I got out, although the girl had moved to a different city, with a different fool, I could not come up with any better place to go.
I’d been unemployed for months, taking a lot of walks, when I wandered onto the unmarked turnoff at the end of Hyde Street. The only boat in harbor was the Barbara. I could hear Sal bellowing all the way from the ramp.
Eventually, a man stormed out of the cabin with a backpack on his shoulder, snatched a pair of slickers from the hooks, and disembarked. Sal was close behind. All I could make out was his cotton undershirt and red suspenders. As the man huffed away, Sal yelled at him in Italian. He brought his hands to his mouth, making a megaphone. “Shoemaker!” Sal cried.
The man neither looked back nor slowed down, just raised his arm and gave Sal the bird.
I passed him on the dock. When I got to the Barbara, I discovered that Sal was corpulent and geriatric. The suspenders were patterned with blue anchors and the undershirt with stains both work- and lunch-related. Before I could introduce myself, he said, “If you’re here for the fucking harbor fee, tell Curtis I’ll pay him next week.”
“I don’t know Curtis,” I said.
Sal peered at me. “You a Marelli?”
“No, sir.”
“What do you want, then?”
“A job.”
Sal stepped to the rail to better see. “Ever decked a bow-picker?”
“No, sir.”
“Drift-netter?”
“No, sir.”
“Trawler? Dredger? Seiner? Any kind of boat? Any damn thing that floats?”
I shook my head.
Sal nodded. “You do the drugs?”
“No, sir.”
“And you’re sure you ain’t a Marelli.”
“What’s a Marelli?”
“What’s a Marelli!” Sal bayed. He slapped the rail and hooted. Then he said it a second time—“What is a Marelli?”—and welcomed me aboard.
—
The ebb wants to take us out to sea. We buck it the other way, along the Embarcadero, past the loading docks and the point. When we reach McCovey Cove, in the shadow of the ballpark, Sal says, “You’re wondering why I made you buy them flares.”
The clouds have lifted. He is steering from the deck and I am on my knees, fixing tangled harnesses, unfucking a cluster. There is something in his voice—it gives me a bad feeling. Before Sal can tell me what it is, we spot the Pedrotti crew, laying out their gear along the hull of a moored tanker. Dominic Pedrotti reverses off the buoy, while his two sons, Lenny and Vito, guide the corks and leads off the reel, over the roller, into the drink. When they wind it back the net is empty.
“Barren grounds!” Sal shouts at the Pedrottis. “Last time they put roe here I still had a working pecker!”
Big Dom is a humorless man. He has debts, a pretty wife. As he motors by, he glowers darkly and says, “This whole bay is barren, Sal.”
It is true. How many times have I heard how the herring used to spawn? How the milt would get so thick the anchors almost floated? Glory days, over long before I showed. Sal blames the sea lions, and the city for protecting them. (Of course, gilling every fish from Islais Creek to Tiburon, decade after decade, had nothing to do with it.) Every profit-minded captain has vamoosed—north to Bellingham or south to Monterey. Nowadays, only the families remain: fathers with nothing else to give their sons, sons with no one else to be except their fathers. Per custom, my take of almost zero gross is zero. But room and board are free: a bunk like a coffin, daily mac and gravy.
It suits me. I am used to worse.
After a few skunk sets near Treasure Island, we ride the ebb back to the marina. It is while we are drifting on a slack tide, keyed into my kind of quiet, that Sal brings up the flares again. He sits in the captain’s chair, gazing through the windshield. Across North Beach, Chinatown, Russian Hill, the lamps are yellow.
“Well?” he asks.
“Well what?”
“How about it?”
I look at the city. I am speechless.
Sal swivels the chair to face me squarely. “How much do you think Paulie got for the Beaut?” he says, meaning Paul Aparo, who, after failing to find a buyer last year, had to bring the Western Beauty to the wrecker, break her into pieces, and sell the pieces off for scrap.
“You’re talking insurance fraud,” I say.
Sal makes a face and bats away the quibble like it smells funky.
He is right. I don’t know why I said it. Insurance fraud? That’s not what bothers me.
—
According to the Buds, Sal went through deckhands, before me, at an approximate rate of two per season. Bud Jr. claims he’s seen him reduce more than one salty dog to tears—among them two of the Marelli brothers. One weekend when the fishery was closed, says Junior, Jack Marelli asked why they alone were on the water, tracking shoals they couldn’t catch. “Would you rather go to shore?” inquired Sal. When Jack responded yes, that’s exactly what he rathered, Sal dropped him off on Alcatraz, where he had to camp out on the ramparts until the Monday-morning ferry could bring him back to San Francisco. When I asked Bud Jr. how Sal had managed, physically, to get Jack off the boat, Bud laughed and said, “Guy jumped.”
None of the old-timers expected me to last the winter. Even now, they are unsure what to make of it. I can tell by the way they look at us: Bud Sr., Big Dom, and the rest. Don’t ask me why. Sal and I have always tolerated each other. Maybe it’s because, unlike Jack Marelli, I have never asked to come to shore—because, like Sal, there’s no place there I have to be.
—
We don’t speak of it again until the tide turns and the flood starts to tug us south.
Then I say, “I’ll make you a deal.”
Sal arches an eyebrow—a perfect chevron. On the one hand, he has already made up his mind and d
oes not require my approval; on the other, he is an inveterate gambler.
“If we get a quarter-ton tonight,” I say, “you don’t go through with it. You finish the season. You put the boat on blocks.”
“And if we’re short?”
“I will cooperate with your harebrained gambit.”
Sal throws back his head. He kneads his turkey neck with the air of a philosopher stroking his beard. “Three-quarters.”
“No.”
“Three-quarters or no deal.”
“Sal.”
“Up to you.”
I sigh. “Half-ton.”
“Half-ton?”
“But,” I say, “I get to pick the sets.”
Sal grins and extends his hand. “Even if I avoided them on purpose, I’d stand a better chance at half a ton than you.”
“Not tonight,” I say.
For a moment, when he sees the handkerchief pinched between my thumb and finger, black with leaked oil and hydraulic fluid, Sal is, for once, bamboozled. Then he swivels to the wheel, puts the boat in gear, and says, “Where to?”
—
We head east, across the tide, and can soon make out the shipyards of Richmond: loading cranes, like enormous steel animals, menacing the shore. I see color on the sonar and tell Sal to stop.
“That’s plankton,” he says.
“That’s herring,” I say.
We go out and pay a shackle or two of net into the water. Soon as they’re wet Sal winds them back. I lean over the bow, watching the corks rise out of the black. Even several feet down I can see the iridescent bellies shimmering like coins as they are lifted from the deep. The first bunch drops like a sack onto the deck.
“Plankton?” I say.
Sal just sulks—but this time, I am sure he’s heard. I find a plump female and break her open. Bright-orange roe spills like ripe fruit.
We clean the shackles, lay out the rest, throw the anchor. In the cabin, I light the stove while Sal folds down the table and deals the cards.
We are a couple games in when he says, “Whatever happens, this is my last season.”
I focus on my hand; after a minute, Sal adds, “If you had any sense, it’d be yours too.”
Later, while he shuffles, I catch him glancing at the sonar. He goes to the stove, opens the carburetor, and lets more diesel onto the flame. “My way,” he says when he sits down, “we get out with cash.”
“Who said I’m getting out?”
Sal deals. For a time, he is silent. Then he says, “I’m not giving you the boat. Forget about that.”
I laugh and shake my head like that is the last thing I would want. But I know that if I try to say so, my voice will fail me.
Sal, he knows too.
—
Just before dawn, we go out to have a look. The fog advances like a ghost glacier down the Carquinez, toward the Pacific. Sal controls the reel while I help the gear into the bow. When the first bunch plunks over, my stomach turns. A number of herring are gilled in the web; a third of them, though, are decapitated heads, no bodies. Another third are gutted bodies, no heads.
“Sea lions,” I say.
Sal manages not to comment. Anyhow, even with most of the net picked clean, it is a haul. I rake them into the hole, and we both stand over that mess, reckoning.
It’s close. It could be half a ton.
—
Between seasons, Sal always kept me busy. After the close, we’d take the boat up the Sacramento, to his place in Collinsville. When Sal grew up there, he once told me, trains still stopped in town to be unbuckled and conveyed across the delta via barge; the waterfront was overrun with immigrants; Sal’s father and uncles still harvested Chinook with the same wood-hulled feluccas they had sailed in Italy. By the time I saw it, Collinsville was a wind farm: pastures and turbines, the boarded-up homes of an entire county that had long since crossed the river to Contra Costa.
Sal’s place stood on stilts, so close to the bank that during a big tide you could spit out the kitchen window into the water. A crooked dock extended from the front door, over the cattails, all the way to where the bottom dropped. When I wasn’t working on the Barbara, or performing renovations on Sal’s house, barn, yard, skiffs, and vehicles, I’d swim for hours in that brackish current—lie for hours on those weathered, sunbaked planks.
Sal napped most of the day. In the evenings, he’d come out with a case of Michelob, a can of night crawlers, and we would seat a couple rods in the flag holders he’d screwed into the pilings. The Chinook were long gone, but you could still get a sturgeon. If it was a monster, Sal would tie a line around its tail and keep it leashed there in the shallows.
Once or twice, after a few beers, I was able to coax out of him a reminiscence or two about the war. What he survived in Korea was so much worse than anything I ever had to deal with, it seems unfair to call it by the same name. Still, I often talked about Afghanistan—because I wanted to, for one, and because I thought it might inspire Sal to do the same. Usually it didn’t. I remember one night, watching the suburban glow bloom over Contra Costa, I started telling him about the mosque. I’d never told anybody about the mosque. If I couldn’t entertain him, I guess I figured, I would at least appall the man. Before I got very far, Sal pushed himself up from his lawn chair, staggered to the end of the dock, and pissed.
“The only thing these stories are good for is getting laid,” he said. “And I’m not fucking you.”
—
When we arrive at the pump, most of the fleet is already in line. The Pedrottis are up front—Big Dom on the pier, talking to the buyer. The buyer wears a suit and tie, galoshes, and a hooded windbreaker. He holds a storage clipboard, the kind that opens, stacked with carbon-copy receipts. He is the last buyer of herring left in San Francisco, and he knows it. As usual, he is telling Dominic something Dominic does not want to hear. They both look at the scale, not each other.
When it’s our turn, I tie the Barbara to the pilings and Sal steps onto the gunwale. He waits for a swell to lift him nearer the ladder. Beneath the pier, row after row of panes of sun angle down from between the planks. They make electric lines that squiggle on the moving water. Pigeons pace the joists, drop from their perches, flash through the panes.
Up top, several captains watch Sal with concern. When Sal reaches them, the buyer hooks him under the arm and helps him up.
“Waitin’ for that fuckin’ thing to fall off?” Sal says.
The pump operator swings out a big hose suspended from a metal boom; I open the hatch and guide it into the hole. The operator presses a button, and the pump bucks to life.
“That it?” he asks after a minute.
“Hold on.”
I climb into the hole. A few fish remain—on the sides, in the corners. I suction them up.
Ten minutes or more go by before Sal reappears at the top of the ladder. In his hand he holds the receipt.
I do not need to see it.
I can tell by the look on his face.
—
The mood at the harbor is more upbeat than usual. Most of the crews made market, and the fog has lifted to reveal, of all things, the sun. While Sal sleeps, I visit the Captain Smilie. Both Buds are supine on the deck, shirts off and draped across their faces. Bud Sr. glistens with tanning oil, his chest hair gooped and matted like a buildup in a drain. “That better be a cloud,” he says when my shadow lands on him.
“I come humbly, in search of wisdom,” I say.
Bud Sr. holds up a finger while the broadcaster on his portable radio narrates a play. Then he gropes for the dial and turns the volume down. He rolls the finger, inviting me to speak.
“Who’s Barbara?” I say.
It is a question I have never asked. Shy as he is on Korea, Sal has even less to say about his family. It was the Buds who told me “the diabetes” killed his wife, and it was from them that I learned about his son. Rumors on the fallout abound. During my time in Collinsville, I have never seen him.
&nb
sp; Bud Sr. clasps his hands behind his head, exposing the pale sides of his arms. “Barbara as in the Lady Barbara?” he says.
“No,” says Bud Jr. “As in Barbara Walters. As in Barbara Bush. As in—”
Quick as a diving pelican, Bud Sr. snatches the shirt from Bud Jr.’s face and flings it over the rail.
“Really?” says Bud Jr. Then he gets up to go find the gaff hook.
“Yes,” I say, “as in the Lady Barbara.”
“Barbara was Mario’s mother,” Bud Sr. says.
“Who’s Mario?”
“Mario Apuzzo.”
I wait for Bud Sr. to elaborate. When, instead, he turns the volume back up on the radio, I say, “This Mario. Sal had something with his mother?”
Bud Sr. sits up on his elbows. His face looks like he just smashed his hand or touched something hot. “You’re another one, aren’t you?” he says. “No wonder you and Sal get on.”
“Sal didn’t have something with his mother?”
“Sal bought the boat from Mario,” Bud Sr. says. “Just never changed the name.”
—
When I return to the Barbara, Sal is sitting at the table, a cardboard box before him. The box contains some rubber-banded paperwork and other miscellany: the wood fid his father used for splicing lines, his dog tags from Korea, a piece of whalebone with a ship scrimshawed on it. I am to take the box, along with whatever belongings of my own I don’t wish to contribute to Davy Jones’s locker, to Sal’s truck on Hyde Street. Then I am to drive to Collinsville. Later, while Sal plays senile, I will tell whatever investigators the insurance company dispatches that I went to Sal’s to collect a new net. It’s a decent plan. Half the fleet saw us snag that boulder on the flats off Sausalito.
I pack my bag and take up the box.
“This way, we get paid,” Sal says.
On my trip up the ramp, no one looks twice. The box, the bag—both of them together might be a week’s worth of trash.
—
Of course, no, it is not about getting paid. For some time now, he has been trying to drop me on the shore. There was the roofer, the sheetrocker, the painter, the plumber—all friends or relatives of Sal’s. The job at which I lasted longest was as a laborer for a contractor. After a month, Rich Caruso put me with the carpenters, and by winter I was wearing a tool belt and running the saws. That year, when I showed up at the harbor a week before the season opened, Sal tried hard to look disappointed. Then he mumbled something in Italian, went inside, and returned with the mop.
These Heroic, Happy Dead Page 12
