Since
Buddy's death, they'd used the house as a makeshift shelter for the
homeless. Neither their neighbors on Franklin nor the authorities
were amused. Faced with a withering volley of suits and injunctions,
the Boys had turned to me. I, in turn, had passed them on to my
attorney, Jed James, who, while way out of their financial league,
was such a lover of underdogs and lost causes that he'd seemed a
natural. His approach was to meet salvo with salvo. Thus far, he'd
kept the powers that be at bay with a veritable hail of writs and
show-cause orders. Privately, he'd confided to me that it was just a
matter of time before the authorities had their way. Perhaps that
explained why Jed had been looking so hard for me and why the Boys,
in spite of instructions to the contrary, had been around.
"There's
a new Chucho Valdez CD." Hector interrupted my thoughts. In
addition to conspiracy, Hector and I also shared a love of jazz,
particularly the Afro-Cuban variety. Burro notwithstanding, without
Hector and his embargo-defying relatives in Miami, I wouldn't have
know Chucho Valdez from Juan Valdez.
"Make
me a tape."
"Chewer.
Jew tell dem bums. Okay, Leo?" "Okay, Hector. Later."
The
answering machine yielded several calls from Jed, a heartwrenching
potential employment opportunity that involved finding a lost
dog—Muffy, I believe it was—and the usual collection of
telemarketing schemes that besmirch the airways these days.
I
wandered over to the refrigerator and pulled the
note
off the top. The pressure of my hand ploughed a furrow in the
collected grease and grime. I reckoned somebody needed to clean off
the top of the fridge. There was printing on one side of the
torn-in-half piece of blue paper. Scrawled on the unprinted side, the
message was brief.
Heck
needs you. He's in Swedish. Room 222.
Marge.
Henry
"Heck" Sundstrom was a major supporting player in the movie
of my life. During my high school years, I'd worked three winters on
Heck's commercial fishing boat, the Lady Day—a jet-black Limit
Seiner, fifty-eight feet with a nineteen-foot beam, built and rigged
to spend six months a year seining the obsidian waters of the Bering
Strait for salmon and black cod and six months being scraped,
painted, and refitted in preparation for another season.
When
the Lady Day hit the dock in early September every year, Rudy and
Angel were on their way south before the diesel fumes had settled.
They were fishermen. Refitting was beneath their dignity. That
was a job for a kid. My old man, as usual, knew somebody who knew
somebody who knew Heck. It was the hardest work I'd ever done and the
best time I'd ever spent. I dreamed of the days ahead when I'd be
able to prove myself worthy of going fishing. While my mother was
dreaming of law school, I was dreaming of ling cod.
Heck
was a third-generation Seattle fisherman. With an uncanny combination
of luck, hard work, and business sense he'd parlayed the mortgage on
his grandfather's hand-built wooden fifty-two footer into the Lady
Day, a paid-for, half-million-dollar, state-of-the-art vessel whose
staunch steel sides and cozy top-house gave a man the courage to once
again risk the hard northern waters for profit.
He'd
been unmarried then, seemingly a lifetime
bachelor.
A man's man, he answered to no one. He'd lived on board, playing host
to an ever-changing assortment of waterfront characters who'd stop by
for a drink or two, disappear for a month, and then suddenly return
to find the party more or less where they'd left it.
In
those days, the air displacement of his physical presence seemed to
bob lesser men about. I'd stay aboard on Friday and Saturday nights
when the perpetual party, after enough booze and testosterone,
sometimes degenerated into round-robin arm-wrestling sessions. I'd
watch in amazement as Heck, his massive arm steady as a rock, would
casually make small talk with onlookers while larger opponents, their
faces beet-red, streaked with sweat, their bodies shaking with the
strain, failed to move him an inch. When the desire moved him, he'd
put them down in a single swift movement without ever interrupting
the patter.
He
was everything I could imagine a man wanting to be. Unlike my old
man, who was forever moving and shaking behind the scenes, Heck
grappled directly with reality and won. He was my hero. In those
days, we didn't have role models yet. He'd seemed untouchable,
somehow destined to forever continue his yearly migration to the sea,
to the party and back.
Destiny
went into the dumpster the moment Marge sashayed onto Dock 2 that day
in early October more than twenty-three years ago. She was about
twenty-two or so, not too many years my senior, and ripe in a way
usually limited to a tropical fruit. Her family was visiting old Mel,
who ran Lubber, the greasy spoon at the marina. Over six feet, she
was nearly as big as Heck and put together in a package of truly
fearful symmetry. On other women, the simple blue frock was just a
house dress for ironing or a quick trip to the market: on Marge it
was neon. The image of her that
day,
thick auburn hair backlit by the late-afternoon sun, seemingly on
fire, is still burned somewhere on my retinas.
As
she ambled down the dock fully aware of her effect yet profoundly
disinterested, jaws gaped; the daily tasks of rerigging and cleaning
up, so essential to boat maintenance, stopped dead on every craft she
passed. I gawked with the others, filled with an odd mixture of
excitement and anxiety, as if one of my fevered adolescent dreams had
finally arrived, only to find me withered and wanting. Martin Henry,
who kept the Mary B in the slip next to Heck's, later confided to me
that he'd been fixing a rope end while gawking at Marge that day and
had nearly severed his thumb. Like me, he still carries the scar.
In
all the years since that day, I've never seen it again. As a matter
of fact, if it weren't for that single moment, I wouldn't believe it
at all. I'd figure it was just the exaggerated way people remember
their pasts so that their lives will seem to have more drama and less
sadness. I'd have been wrong. It was love at first sight. From three
boats away, Marge and Heck honed in on one another like a couple of
hormonally guided missiles. At first, I thought it was me she was
looking at and was instantly lifted. Luckily, before I could make an
ass of myself, Heck eased me aside. To this day, I'm convinced that
anyone stepping between them at the precise moment when their eyes
met would surely have been killed by the combined power of their
gazes. In that single moment, Heck knew that life as he had known it
was over. I knew that he knew. Marge knew that we both knew.
Rudy,
Angel, and I found that our services were no longer required. Within
a week, Heck was without crew. It wasn't just us either. The party
was just plain over. Boarders were summarily repelled. The Lady Day
gave up her berth on Dock 2, a Sundstrom stronghold for nearly forty
years, and moved down to
Dock
7, the nominal line of demarcation between the commercial and the
gentlemen fishermen, a more civilized environ where tourists could
stroll the docks on weekends without fear of so much as smudging
their togs, let alone taking a broom support in the melon.
Marge,
in spite of her limited years, was a woman who knew what she wanted.
Instead of trying to melt herself amiably into the maze of Heck's
past life and acquaintances, she'd simply started his life over for
him. She kept his old friends at a distance. On those occasions when
Heck and I got together after they were married, I could sense her
impatience with any story that had transpired before she'd walked
into his life. She'd immediately redirect the conversation to the
present, as if the thirty-odd years of his past had merely been a
prolonged prelude to her arrival. One by one, she'd phased us out.
Surprisingly, Heck didn't seem to mind; obviously, she was all he
needed. God, how I'd hated her back then.
Within
five years she'd gotten him off the boat and into wholesale. Fleets
of Sea Sundstrom vans now supplied local restaurants with the fresh
fish for which they were so justly famous.
They
had also had a son. Over the years, I'd seen the newly prominent
Sundstroms in the paper once in a while. Maybe it was my imagination,
but Heck always looked vaguely uncomfortable and strangely out of
place. Marge, to my great annoyance, looked good even in newsprint.
The kid, Nick I think it was, had turned out to be a pretty good
halfback for Ballard High. Rumor had it that Heck shared his success
with a number of worthy causes. I thought back to the last time I'd
seen him.
I'd
spied on him, across the packed room, at a fundraiser for the
families of those lost at sea. This was six or seven years ago.
Instinctively, I'd squirmed and shouldered my way through the crowd
to his side.
Without
thinking, we'd embraced, the intervening years instantly evaporating.
His face cracked with an idiotic grin, he grasped me by both
shoulders and held me off the ground at arm's length as if I were a
doll. Before either of us had time to speak, the sea of humanity
suddenly parted and Marge, more stunning than ever, appeared at his
side, smiling that smile. She had someone for Heck to meet. So nice
to see me again. She took him by the elbow. Heck barely had time for
a quick look over his shoulder as they melted into the melee. It was
a moment of such encompassing awkwardness that it resurfaced,
fresh and hot on my face, every time I thought about Heck Sundstrom,
which was more often than I would have chosen.
I
leaned back against the fridge. Scraping the sludge off the printed
side of the note, I could just make out what it had once been. It was
a final notice from Puget Power. They wanted their three hundred
seventy-four dollars and twelve cents, and they wanted it by last
Friday.
Swedish
Hospital squats at the apex of Pill Hill, the blond cement of her
estimable girth warding off all challengers for that most lofty
section of lower Broadway that has, over the past decade,
evolved into the medical epicenter of the city. Not surprisingly, the
presence of five major hospitals in a couple of square miles has
spawned multifarious schools of specialists and technologists who
hover and dart about the neighborhood, always alert for bigger,
better office space, eager to bill, ever ready to snap up any crumbs
that might float from the mouths of the great beasts. Whether medical
services have improved is a matter of great debate; that parking has
gone to shit is without question.
Unable
to find anything legal on either Minor or Colombia, I wound down the
hill toward Boren, getting lucky, finding a space on the shady side
of St. James Cathedral, half a block uphill from O'Dea High School.
Any
vestige of morning fog had been swept aside by the earthy breezes of
Indian summer. The uphill walk, padded by the first red maple leaves
of the season, was enough to raise beads of sweat on my forehead. I
skirted piles of sand, rebar, and wire mesh, the remnants of the
ongoing state of siege that the unending construction left in its
wake. I found a side door.
I
didn't see him at first. In the hard hospital bed, he looked small,
inanimate, and out of place. Several tufts of blond hair, mostly gone
gray at the center, had somehow wriggled free of the mummy-like
bandages covering most of his head. His left hand, reddened and
clenched like an oak burl atop the covers, sprouted a plastic IV tube
that was anchored in place by yet another maze of tape. He was alone.
I walked to the foot of the bed and plucked his chart from the
built-in receptacle.
I
was lost in the scribbles when he stirred, tightening his body,
seemingly attempting to sit up. I slid around to his left side and
put a hand on his shoulder. The touch seemed to comfort him. He
relaxed again, smoothing the deep lines of his forehead, sending the
blood back around the system, again making visible the network of
fine pink capillaries that hatched his nearly translucent skin.
"He
sat up twice yesterday. They say it's just muscle contractions."
Marge
stood half-in, half-out of the door, her right arm braced on the
beige wall. She wore a thick forest-green turtleneck sweater, a shade
darker than her eyes, blue jeans, and what looked to be python cowboy
boots. Large gold hoop earrings diverted attention from the gray in
her thick hair. She wasn't twenty anymore. No sir—to my eye, at
least, she looked a whole lot better than that. Nature, with uncommon
kindness, provides most of us with a rationalized scale of beauty, a
balanced image in keeping with our stations of life. Unlike Tony
Moldonado, most of us manage to surmount the aching for buxom
airbrushed cheerleaders and find ourselves one day mercifully able to
envision strength of character in a facial line or two and
intellectual weight in the slight sag of a breast. By synchronizing
that which is possible with that which is desired,