Mendocino Fire Read Free Page A

pulse tripping where a vein swelled in his temple, this visibly hardworking vein striking Nate as dangerous. But the veins that were really troublesome were deep in the brain, he told himself, not right out there in the open. “Dad?” “Give me a minute”—not an answer Shug had ever voiced before. “My damn shoulder hurts. You go ahead”—two more things Shug had never said. What it came down to was that time was taking its toll, and at least for this one radiant day he couldn’t keep up with his son.
    Past midnight now, and Nate hoped Shug had done the smart thing and gone to bed instead of staying up swapping lies on the radio. In the ice hold’s echoing chill, his two or three different and overlapping shadows flaring in the corners as the fluorescence quickened, Nate’s boots imprinted a melting black meander as he crossed back and forth, slinging fish into the silver dune, tired enough that the prospect of sleep made him want to sink to his knees in the ice like one of those climbers yielding to death on Everest. He clicked off the light before climbing to the deck for a last look around. They were far enough from shore to drift for the night and the Louise had settled into near silence. Below in the fo’c’sle he found Shug asleep, longish black hair fanned across the ticking of the pillow, tattered and filthy, that he refused to part with or let Louise wash because he believed it was lucky. Disgusting, Nate said, but his mother laughed and said it could be worse, what if he had lucky Jockey shorts? Theshushing of the sea against the hull turned the space chapel-like, and the need to keep quiet as he undressed made Nate feel like a good child, respectful, or as if he was in the presence of his dead father, feeling what he was supposed to feel.
    Not that night but the next, Nate woke to the awareness that Shug’s bunk was empty. “Hey, Dad? Where’d you get to?” The deck gleamed back at the moon, the day’s blood sluiced away, Shug working while Nate slept: walk barefoot the length of the boat and your feet would stay clean as a newborn babe’s. Nate retrieved the toilet seat and clapped it on the bucket, the seat an old wooden one, paint rubbed away in a bottom-shaped arc, his dad’s arse and his, any other son would have conceded no more than a postcard, Santa Fe, Sydney, some lawless postmark north of the Arctic Circle. Nate emptied the bucket over the side.
    â€œDad?”
    An arm extended from the door of the cabin, the hand resistless as a dead thing when Nate gathered it up, when he crouched saying, “No, no,” his fingers against the inside of the wrist finding nothing, hoping, finding nothing. Nate let shock carry him a short way into death after his father by neither moving nor blinking, concentrating on the death in his father’s face but not knowing what it was like or how to go deeper, to take part in this death that intolerably excluded you and left you hanging. Then stupefaction as the pulse flailed against your fingertips and the need to make sure you weren’t deceived by the force of longing. The sea slid past, the moon poured down, and Shug sat up sick and disheveled with a glare that held Nate responsible.
    â€œI think you fell, Dad. Fell and banged your head. Hold on, hold on, don’t be thrashing or you could hurt yourself worse.”
    In trying to get him to lie back Nate was reminded that Shug was a big man, his back broader across than his son’s and showing a distinct slide and play when he worked shirtless, a bunching and cording along his forearm when he threaded the hook into the herring and trimmed its tail till the glint of metal was perceptible, baitfish and hook coequal, no excess for salmon to snatch unscathed. On first demonstrating the technique to Nate, he had said This is sex. Nothing to spare, no little bit to nibble off. The beauty of it: it’s all hook. Nate had been