Terminal Island Read Free Page A

leather belt, he could just retire to quarters with his mother. But his exemption from the bad was echoed in the good: it increasingly felt like charity.
    Henry doesn’t remember exactly how or when the situation was explained, but at some point it came out that his own father died before he was born. This was not by itself a traumatic discovery—he did not feel the lack of a father, except insofar as it set him and his mother apart from the others. He did not want a father, per se. What he wanted was to be the same as everyone else.
    But alike or not, his cousins were stuck with him, just as he was with them. Whether resentful or pitying, they had no other playmates, there being an extreme scarcity of children in the industrial gulag of the harbor district.
    As the boys got older, approaching school age, their wanderings increased to encompass the street and the train yard beyond, so that they became spectators of the mechanized drama of the harbor, and connoisseurs of the varied modes of freight-hauling, their favorite being a spindly, spider-like truck that rolled along on tall struts which enabled it to drive over large cargo boxes, tuck them up underneath itself, and scoot off down the highway. To Henry and his cousins, the operator of this vehicle, seated up on his thrillingly high, exposed perch, was the monarch of the road, even more to be envied than the train engineers who waved back at them as they walked beside the tracks.
    But there was still something that outshone the cargo trucks and all the other harbor commerce. That literally soared above the mundane activity of the terminal:
    The gleaming white seaplanes of the Catalina ferry line.
    These planes—classic specimens of the tubby, boat-like Grumman Goose, now to be found only in the aviation museum of the Smithsonian—would land and take off from the harbor many times a day, yet Henry never got over the thrill of seeing them, nor of hearing the roar of their fat, wing-mounted engines as they revved for take-off, wreathed in spray. There was magic about these things; the spectacle of their uncanny, amphibious flight so much like something out of the movies, and movies—especially given the proximity of Hollywood—were a big and increasing part of Henry’s early life.
    Then, not long after Henry’s fifth birthday, the shit hit the fan.
    He didn’t know what it was about, but his mother Vicki had a final falling-out with the family, a furious disagreement, and before Henry knew what was happening she had all their things packed up in a fat Yellow Cab, scooting in beside him and tearfully waving goodbye as they pulled away for all time from everyone he knew and the familiar, comforting gloom of the Del Monte Hotel.
    We’ll be back , she called to her distraught, dying mother. Don’t worry, we’ll be back .
    The next few years were a blur of pure chaos. Henry and Vicki lived from motel to motel (most apartment owners of the time disdaining children, much less single mothers), chasing jobs and cheap housing all over Greater Los Angeles, gaining and losing footholds until at last ending up where they began: overlooking the harbor.
    Yes, they returned to San Pedro. Henry’s mother kept her promise; they had come back home.
    But the Del Monte Hotel was gone.

    “Didn’t I tell you it was coming?” his mother said.
    Henry was eight years old now, almost nine, and thought he had seen it all. But everything past was prologue—all the disappointments and retreats, the winnowing of their possessions down to what could be carried on the bus—all of it shrank to insignificance before the wonderful vision that descended from the sky, banked overhead to kiss them with its hurtling shadow, and touched down not like a goose but like a white swan upon the water. It was their vision, coming for them . They had the tickets to prove it.
    The magnificent sight of that seaplane as it waddled out of the harbor onto dry land, white keel dripping, fat black rubber wheels