Mendocino Fire (3 page)

“Good news,” a male nurse said, waking Nate. “Your dad
did great! He did fantastic! You can go in and visit. Frankly some people seem a little taken aback but I told them there's a lot of mileage left in that handsome old man. But who listens to me.”

With Shug housebound, Nate was able to take out a couple of persuasive Sacramento lobbyists for several illicit jaunts, and the lobbyists let some friends in on the secret, and those friends told others. Getting caught with scuba gear and abalone would mean a steep fine, suspended fishing license, even jail time, but the lobbyists basked in the risk like it was sunshine. When they went back to Sacramento, Nate figured, he'd better do a couple days' hard fishing to account for the cash in case the IRS or Shug ever ran a cold eye over the books. He was alone, leaning to toss a bucket of refuse, when a wave lolloped into the bow and the
Louise
shrugged him into the sea. Opening his eyes underwater, he had a vision of fish guts unknitting in a bumbling cloud. He slid down as if he had let go of a rope and the speed of his descent scared him into kicking. He surfaced in breathable light, scales gumming his hair and lashes. He spat and gagged. Ten minutes to hypothermia, the cold already searing, and how far had he been carried, and take a breath, take a big breath, here it comes. Concentrating underwater, he scraped his toes down his heel, shedding one sluggish boot, then the other. He surfaced and the shadow of a gull rumpled interestedly across his head, followed by another wave. He strove against the cataract and lost, borne backward into a trough rolling with echoes, and despite this setback he felt his body coming back after long years' absence, gathered and intent and smoothly useful, his soul right here too, brilliantly distinct, a thing that could be torn
from him, and he wished to cradle and save it, his soul, and to do that he had only to swim, he was for once wholly aligned with necessity, rejoicing in the clear, clear light of live or die, taking pleasure in his strength, given a stinging outline by the cold,
stroke, breathe, stroke
, narrowing in on what he needed to do next, which was to swim around and take hold of the rungs and climb. A Jacob's ladder, wooden rungs on sturdy ropes. There she was, a neat small craft, handsomely white in the early radiance, illumined from behind so that he noted the opalescence of spindrift within her shadow, the changeable, suddenly darkened, redoubled green of a wave sliding through the tent of the boat's shadow and casting a shattered pearliness up through the shadow into the bright air, where it floated in a brief-lived haze. No boat used for trawling salmon had a ladder. Potbellied, arrogant, the lobbyists had been in such bad shape it was hard to believe they wanted to dive, and it wasn't a pretty sight watching them clamber up that ladder, but now they were about to save his ass. Without the ladder he would have been treading water between the swells, keeping the
Louise
in sight though she was no use to him, staring at her as long as he could because she was the one known thing, the last human thing out there with him.

In the cabin, whose disorder proved it was no longer Shug's domain, Nate found a change of clothes, his dad's, and washed his face and rinsed his mouth clean of brine with bottled water, rubbing his hair dry with a rag saturated with engine oil. To his scoured senses the world was a glittering, reeling heaven of sensation: he would forever after associate the smell of engine oil with the shock of being alive. Elation like this wouldn't last long—he knew even a minor setback could confound it, by introducing reality—but once the
Louise
was docked, the gladness was still there, and in hopes of sustaining it he stopped in at
the Harbor Cafe on the wharf. Leaning back in his booth, he greeted the approach of the waitress with a smile inspired more by his own exhilaration than by her familiarity, and this smile, which wasn't about her, which suggested a rowdy, causeless pleasure in being alive, caught her off guard. Her hair was a blond ponytail falling not down her back but across her shoulder, as if she'd drawn it forward to show off its length. She had something in her left eye, and the compulsive blinking made her feel ridiculous. In her distraction she lost his name and sought it in a quick inner stammer of guesses. Blinking, she poured coffee into the cup he nudged forward, and he beat her to it. “Ollie.”

Then he said something she was never to understand. He said, “There you are.”

It wasn't Shug's heart that gave out, it was Louise's, in her sleep.
Peaceful
, people said, and
Such luck she lived long enough to hold the baby
.

Nate and Ollie and the baby lived in a trailer set on cinder-blocks behind the house that was now Shug's alone, in a yard knee-deep in thistles and sorrel and wild radish that Ollie resolved every spring to turn into an organic garden, but before they knew it it was midsummer and that plan, like their others, withered into bemused postponement. Sometimes it was Ollie who said wearily
Look at this place
, sometimes it was Nate, coming home exhausted and hoping for some gesture from her that would compensate for his frustration and the weirdness of having to pay rent to his own father and his fear that he would never get them out of this trailer into a real house. Where had it gone, the scruffy dreadlocked rebelliousness of that girl on the boulder? If she was tamed, was she even the same girl? They
were trapped; the future was closing down fast and soon would shut them out altogether. Up to her to convince him otherwise, to reason with, comfort, and inspire him, but how? He said (and regretted it during the saying) that there must have been a time when the prospect of giving him a blow job didn't turn her stomach. At that, the girl on the boulder would have turned on him the Medusa glare of murderous feminism, but she was gone. In a clearing in the trailer's mess the baby sat and blinked and sucked, muzzled by his binkie. It got so the only time they heard each other laugh was when they hunkered down to baby level and adopted funny voices, playing roles they had somehow assigned each other, Nate a talking bear with a hankering for pie, Ollie a vain, dim-witted fairy. Before long their friends with kids started to shake their heads.
Indulge that baby's every wish, let him think your lives revolve around him, and you're creating a monster
: such was the advice directed at Nate and Ollie, who shrugged and smiled.
I pity you two guys
, Rafe announced one stoned midnight when Ollie and Nate both jumped up at a bad-dream whimper from the bedroom,
if it ever comes to working out joint custody.
Rafe didn't have a big mouth usually, but Nate kicked him out for that remark and volunteered, because Ollie was crying, that Rafe was an asshole and jealous besides, and what had happened to Rafe and Annie was never going to happen to them. Which only made Ollie set her two fists against her face, her elbows poked out as if she wanted to punch her own eyes.

He pried her wet fists away, but she wouldn't talk.

Fourteen-hour days for days on end, he worked. Let
her
work, now. Let her pick away at the crazy knot of resistance to him that had tied itself in secret. He didn't know why it had, but it had.

Left over from the brief spellbound time that had followed
his finding her in the café, she had one trick, and when their drought had gone on long enough—almost too long to permit backtracking—she used it, turning to Nate and saying, “What if it was the last time we were ever going to see each other and you knew it, how would you fuck me, what would you do?”

She had taken a chance. He rested rough hands—almost as gnarly as his dad's—on either side of her jaw, and gazing past her everyday self to the deep-down soul-shelter where betrayal stirred—they both knew she was not entirely pretending—he said “I would kill you” with something like the ferocity she needed.

Petey Crews was back from Iraq, and Rafe said they needed to celebrate, the three of them, hit the beach, that little cove where they used to hang out, make a bonfire and get high and drink some beer.

Petey and Nate got an early start and were already drunk, so Rafe drove Nate's truck, hauling hard at the wheel as if caught off guard by each curve. Jammed together in the cab they were not as easy as they had once been—they had lost the hang of shoulder-to-shoulder intimacy. Rafe kept wanting to know if he should turn now—was this the road to the cove?—and they all three squinted at the road snaking out of the dusk, their disorientation a fall from grace, each separately determined to ignore this failure and do what he could to regain the high school sense of rightness, because without it who were they, what had they become? This had been their kingdom—this crescent of nondescript beach, streamers of foam borne toward them, flung high, disintegrating, drained away in pebble-glittering rills. The moon. The companionable shapes of dunes embracing the dead
end that served for a parking lot. Where there was, gradually looming into visibility, another vehicle, a black van with opaque windows and mud-obscured license plate. “Don't fucking tell me,” Rafe said.

They got out and prowled around the van.

“Nobody in there now,” Nate said.

“How do you know?” Petey drank and wiped his mouth, drank again and flung the bottle away, but that was a good thing, not at the van, away into the dark.

“Tracks and scuff marks going away but none coming back,” Nate said.

“Tonto.”

“Let's just leave it,” Rafe said. “Go further down the beach. Make our fire.”

Once the fire was sending seething mares' tails of sparks upward, Petey said, “Isn't it too dark for them to be out there?”

“Using lights, maybe,” Rafe said.

“If they were using lights, wouldn't we see them?”

“Or they saw us, driving up.”

“Shug wants to go out early. I am so screwed. I haven't been this drunk in forever,” Nate said.

They couldn't help watching the surf while they drank.

“Here he comes,” Rafe said.

Ushered onto the beach by a gentle wave, the slender figure advanced with a hampered frog-footed delicacy, his raft rasping and hissing across the sand. Pausing, he slid his mask onto the top of his head, revealing a pale oval face rimmed in sleek black and aimed in their direction. When he moved, points and glimmers from their fire skidded across his oily wetsuit. He set down a bag whose clatter they could hear from where they sat.

Petey said, “Too heavy to carry, the greedy fuck.”

“Gonna be more than one of them,” Rafe said, but they waited and no others emerged from the surf.

“He's alone,” Nate said.

“Dangerous diving alone,” Petey observed.

“You know, Fish and Game really messes with these guys,” Rafe said. “Hits them with these ridiculous fines, basically ruins their families. Bankrupts 'em. Five or more over the limit means they go to jail, and, Jesus, it's not like they're dealing heroin. They're just trying to get by.”

“All I know is, Shug really hates them,” Nate said.

Petey ground his cigarette out in the sand and got to his feet. “This is for Shug.”

Rafe said, “Petey. Come on—who is he hurting.”

But Petey was already halfway to the black figure, who tried to run, tripping on his fins, curling up with his arms wrapped around his black bulb of a skull when Petey drove the toe of his boot once, twice, again into the small of his back, then moved around to the head clasped in slender arms, Rafe and Nate pounding across the sand, Rafe screaming, “Not his head,” Nate screaming too, unsure in the end whether the diver had made any sound at all, and when Petey backed off and Nate knelt with a flash of déjà vu, he believed that upward gaze was the one he had been waiting for all along, the dark gaze that had seen to the end and had nothing to report.

But the limp black frog-footed figure was hoarsely breathing, and it became a question of what to do. Petey stood off to one side while they tried to figure out whether they had to take him somewhere or whether he could be left right there in the sand. “Where he bleeds to death from internal injuries,” Rafe said.

“I dunno,” Petey said quietly. “It could be worse to move
him. His back took some pretty hard hits. Maybe his spine.” As if he had nothing to do with it.

“We're taking him,” Nate decided. “Count of three, we all lift. Petey, you get his hands.”

“This is how we get caught.” Adamant, but throwing down his cigarette.

“You get his hands.”

“I'm telling you, this is the mistake, not what I did. And fuck you pussies, I can carry him myself.”

Staggering over the sand with the diver cradled in his arms, Petey went down on one knee but didn't drop the guy.

Rafe said, sliding his fingers down inside the black cowl, finding a pulse in the throat, “Still with us.”

“Now what do we do?”

“Drop him off in front of the emergency room. In that grass in front of the hospital,” Nate said. “Being careful not to get seen.”

They settled the unconscious figure on a sleeping bag in the camper—Nate remembered just in time that he should be arranged on his side so that if he vomited he wouldn't choke on it—and were climbing into the cab when Petey said, “Wait, man. The goodie bag.”

“Leave it.”

Petey slogged back across the sand toward the raft and came back, listing comically to demonstrate the bag's weight. “More money than any of us've made this year. Who wants it?”

“Put it in the back.”

Within a quarter mile Rafe had to pull over to permit another vehicle, a huge SUV none of them recognized, to buck and lunge past them with inches to spare, Nate swearing at the
other driver for almost scratching his paint job, Rafe saying, “What the fuck, nobody used to come here but us.”

Before light, the phone rang, and Nate reached from the futon to answer, knocking it from the wine-crate nightstand and having to search across the carpet—sandy rumpled topography of his discarded jeans, the ringing chiming through the trailer, rabbit's tail tuft of a balled baby sock, the ringing, slick foil of a condom package, when was that, ringing, constellation of glowing buttons that he held to his ear, scared, remembering, sick, life as he knew it over, a last importuning ring before he hit the right button.