“For the past two weeks, drivers on I-80 in Berkeley have noted a mystery in their daily commute. An abandoned sailboat with its tattered red sails flapping in the wind has been marooned in the Bay mud less than a hundred feet from shore. It is unclear how the vessel, the name “Montagnarde” painted on its hull, came to rest at its prominent location just south of the pedestrian bridge near University Avenue. A district spokesperson for the East Bay Regional Park District, which is responsible for the nearby Brickyard Cove area of McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, said the vessel is not currently causing any navigational problems and does not appear to pose any environmental hazards. The spokesperson also said the boat would be removed as soon as Monday, but it could take longer as the agency processes contracts for the job. In the studio, I’m Peter Tsu, ABC 7 News.”
About fifteen miles north of Berkeley lies the shallow tidal estuary known as San Pablo Bay. On its borders are the silty in-between communities, those left behind by the manifest destiny of the elite. The inhabitants are the ones who do the dirty, unseen work for their richer neighbors to the north and south. In the unincorporated hamlet of Rotavi on the bay’s eastern side, two blocks from the downtown area, a downtown that is nothing but boarded-up storefronts, is the Rotavi Marina. Here, on a spit of waterfront land that has been environmentally ravaged by the monstrous Rotavi Refinery, lives a discreet coterie of rugged individualists.
The headquarters of the unironically named Rotavi Marina Yacht Club is a Quonset hut that was salvaged from the decommissioned naval base on nearby Mare Island. It being wintertime, a pair of salamander heaters were providing heat for the uninsulated structure. Bundled in layers of flannel, fleece, and foul weather gear, the crew of old timers who gathered each night to watch the local news began to whisper amongst themselves. The decrepit boat mentioned in the news story had been a part of the landscape of their community for as long as anyone could remember. To hear its ridiculous French name take on a mysterious air was amusing to them.
Standing behind the chattering grey hairs on their metal folding chairs was a thin, pale man nervously scratching at his tattooed right arm. He quietly slipped out a side door and hurried to his car. He raced south along I-80 until he reached the final resting place of the Montagnarde. It was too dark to know for sure, but by the poor light of the moon, he thought he saw a tiny shirt dangling from a cleat on the boat. Swollen with pangs of guilt, Larry Hansen swore this would be a story he would take to his grave.
Larry had first come to the Rotavi Marina in the dark of night. For years, he had kept a regular rotation of local dives, a different spot for each day of the week, so he wouldn’t have to bear the pity and sorrow of the bartenders and barflies. After closing down The Raconteur, his Thursday bar, he found himself in a caravan of vehicles leading to the humble harbor on San Pablo Bay. The caravan was led by a guy Larry had just met (and whose name he had either forgotten or never known) who wore an orange longshoreman’s vest. The longshoreman had said that he had been kicked out by his wife and was bunking on his father’s boat. All stragglers left when the angry lights came on at the bar were welcome to join him to keep the party going on the deck of his ship.
The port of call turned out to be more of a junkyard than a marina. A cheap storage place for RV’s and land-based boats. The longshoreman’s boat was a twenty-foot pocket cruiser on which he unrolled a sleeping bag and slept under the stars. It was docked in the water, but he never took it out on the bay because there were multiple leaks in the hull and he didn’t know how to sail. Its distinctive red sails, which the longshoreman drunkenly raised one night without remembering how he’d done it or how to get them back down, made the boat an undulating and nauseating place. He seemed to have a handful of neighbors, but no one got riled up over his band of midnight merrymakers. A few even straggled out of their hidey-holes to join the festivities. They shot bottle rockets into the bay, snorted powdered drugs, and drank cheap liquor and beer. Larry got a few hours of sleep on a soft dirt path with his jacket for a pillow.
In the morning, an old fellow with a disobedient salt and pepper mane brought him coffee in a rusted stovetop brewer.
“I suppose you were with that pack of cannibals last night?” the guy said.
From the ground, Larry looked up at the speaker, bemused by the words that he spoke.
“As much of a noise as you all were making, I figured someone was killed, roasted, and eaten,” the fellow continued.
“If it was so,” Larry said, “I didn’t get the invitation.”
The old fellow laughed, hacked up some phlegm, spat on the ground, and laughed again. He introduced himself as Eoghan then told Larry to get himself up out of the dirt and directed him to an old wooden picnic table in front of an RV. He was a gracious host and made Larry cowboy eggs on an outdoor grill and explained some of his past, how he had come to live at the marina, and the history of the community.
“The people here are not the needy or whatever it is we’re supposed to call vagrants these days,” Eoghan said. “We don’t let folks live in cars, and no one sleeps in a tent. Everyone here has a home, it may just be an unconventional one.”
Eoghan had moved to the marina in 2008. He had been living with his mother, whom he had lived with his entire life. When she died, his sister sold the house out from under him. That left him with a tiny bit of money and no place to live. After a few years of living in the windowless cellar of one of his brother-in-law’s businesses, he decided to quit his low-down ways and scratch out a life for himself.
The RV he lived in he had bought for five grand from a kid whose dad had died in it while living at the marina. The community was a bit smaller back then, but not by much. It was started in the late 90s by Ara Brown, a widow and former hairdresser from Crockett who owned and operated a restaurant, a laundromat, and a bar in the area, as well as an alfalfa ranch in Nevada. Following a string of break-ins when she first bought the place, she hired a nightwatchman and allowed him to live for free in an outbuilding on the property. Things sort of sprouted from there, and by the early aughts, a rotating cast of twenty to thirty souls had come to live on the property. Some stayed in RVs and campers, a few on boats, and several folks had built tiny homes. Some people had lived at the marina for a few months, some had been there for many years.
Widow Brown, far from perturbed, was tickled by her fiefdom. She served as the benevolent ruler and rode about the grounds on a gas golf cart resolving disputes and doling out wisdom. There was a code of ethics and honor that came with occupancy, and harsh measures had needed to be taken only one or two times in Eoghan’s memory. Some folks kept to themselves, and that was alright by everyone, but an intermutual artistic and entrepreneurial spirit guided most of the marina’s inhabitants. There was a woman who read palms, another who started a coffee shop out of her trailer, one guy created sculptures out of ocean debris, and a couple that lived in a Tuff Shed had cornered the market with a boat and trailer cleaning business; that was just to name a few. The legal status of all of this was strictly not legal.
“How’d you find this place?” Larry asked.
“Much the same way you found it. There’s a network of fallen souls and we seem to bump into each other along life’s backroads. Have you not found that to be the case?”
Larry bristled at being cast in such a gray light. Eoghan recognized the corkscrew look on his face, laughed, coughed, spit, and laughed again.
“If you ever need a place to stay, give me a call.”
After circumstances changed at his garden apartment in West Oakland, Larry found himself living in a shipping container at Rotavi Marina that had been converted into a studio apartment. Though shower, laundry, and commode were communal and it lengthened his commute to his job deep in the bowels of the California state government, all other aspects of marina living oozed an idyllic aroma.
Having wound up his interminable drinky decade, he was living his life on the square. Going to the grocery store, completing a day of work without taking a nap at his desk, cleaning the floorboards of his car, and filing his taxes on time. The regular, everyday tasks that had once oppressed him, he now performed with easy grace. Having tempered the tempest, Larry sat in his plastic Adirondack chair at night, looking out at the poisoned San Pablo Bay. In the fading sunlight, bottles bobbed on the surface of the water. Water that was discolored and sludgy due to runoff from the refinery that loomed nearby. In the skinny hours, fighting against an invitation from oblivion, he wondered if he should be asking for more from life than this.
He had to hold his nose from time to time, not just to block the everpresent smell of tar and gasoline from the refinery, but also to his neighbors’ unique peccadillos. Blight was everywhere; scrap metal collections, community members who never bathed, and who had a liberal approach to garbage disposal. He was not raised to live amongst riffraff, but he came to see the virtue in their way of life.
Because he read books and had gone to college, the inhabitants of Rotavi Marina assumed Larry was smart. He liked being thought of as smart, even though in his heart of hearts he knew he was quite dumb. The truth was, Larry could no longer assume he was better than any of this. The move had revealed the upper limits preordained upon his life. He wasn’t anywhere near the ceiling nor was he scraping the bottom, and he had come to accept this.
So, in short order, he got into the swing of things and ingratiated himself to the community. He helped out with the elderly whose health made alternative living difficult. He brought them meals, medication, and good cheer. When his turn in the rotation came up, he gaily did his duty of cleaning the shared facilities. He took time to have conversations with neighbors, which was something he had never bothered to do in his past life. Here at the marina he looked out for his fellow man and grew content in knowing that, when the time came, they would look out for him.
As he went out walking along the scraggly coastline of the bay one day, Larry spied something moving upon the deck of the rusted-out tugboat that was run aground just south of the dry docks. The old tug had been lodged there since before the collective’s memory began. Eoghan told Larry it was a Type V, probably last used during the Korean War, and, by his best judgment, hadn’t been sea-worthy in over forty years.
Larry shielded his eyes from the setting sun and squinted out at the figure aboard the boat. It appeared to be a small child, of an age and sex that could not be determined from his distance. He had mild concern for the child’s safety and scrambled through the empty lot composed of tall weeds, broken glass, and chewed-up concrete to get a closer look.
“Hey, you there,” Larry shouted. “It’s not safe to be on that.”
If the child heard him, it gave no indication. Larry moved onto the crumbling dock to get a closer look. He had to make a judgment call with each careful step as to whether or not his foot, leg, or whole body would fall through the molded wood. From his vantage point, Larry could see the scamp had curly blonde hair and stalked about the deck as if it were looking for something. The child was shirtless and covered in mud from head to toe.
“Do you need help?” he shouted.
The child did not answer.
Larry sighed, took off his socks and loafers, and rolled his pants up above his knees. He lowered himself off the dock into the water. It was the day’s second low tide so the water only came up to his ankles. His feet sank into the muddy, disgusting ooze, but he noticed no unpleasing smell. With each step, his foot emerged from the mud with a sickening suction sound.
There were some citizens of the marina who swam in San Pablo Bay for exercise and leisure; Larry was not one of them. The proximity of the ever-clanging refinery seemed a bad omen, and so he was sure cancer was crawling up his leg as he trudged through the muck toward the abandoned tug.
“Hello,” he called out as he came around the hull to the starboard side.
The child showed no recognition.
Since the boat was pitched out to sea, Larry was easily able to hoist himself onto the deck, where he said, “Hello,” again.
“Holy fuck, shit, fuck,” the child said, indicating that he was now aware of Larry’s presence.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to scare you.”
“Well, you did.”
Larry held on to a rigging wire lest he fall into the sea. He saw that the child was a boy, and though he didn’t know children, he guessed that this one must be eight or nine despite its advanced vocabulary. The boy could be six or seven, or ten or eleven though, it was impossible for Larry to say, and he had a furrowed brow and a scowl on his mud-streaked face that indicated anger or confusion.
“I can’t figure out how to get back down,” the boy said in a high-pitched, panicked voice.
“How did you get up here in the first place?”
“I swam out, but now the water’s gone and I don’t want to get sucked down into the quicksand.”
“It’s ok. It’s not quicksand, it’s just mud. Let’s go back, it’s not safe out here.”
Larry jumped back into the mud. The splash caused black guck to splatter his pants. He cursed himself since doing laundry at the marina was a burden and the pants were not an insignificant expense for him.
“Hop on down,” he said to the boy. “I’ll catch you.”
The boy did as he was told. Larry caught him and noticed he was quite light for his size. As he attempted to set him in the shallow water, the kid held on to Larry tightly. The child shook his head from side to side, indicating he did not want to be put down.
“It’s not quicksand. I swear you won’t be sucked under.”
The boy buried his head into Larry’s shoulder. Larry sighed and carried him back to the dock. He placed him on the rotten wood, and before Larry could pull himself up, the boy had run off toward the marina dwellings.
His legs coated with bay mud, Larry scooped up his shoes and carried them over the rubble and up the gravel path to his shipping container.
Larry ran into the longshoreman, whose name he still did not know. He was sitting on his boat and enjoying the sunset from a folding chair with a Rolling Rock in hand and a twelve-pack at his side.
“What’s up Lar,” he said. “Want a cold cruiser?”
“Yeah, maybe I do.”
Larry rinsed off his feet and legs from a spigot attached to the pier.
“Did you see a muddy little kid run by here?”
“Chasing little kiddos around, Lar? You old pedo.”
“Jesus Christ, man, no. I found a kid playing on the tugboat. I had to carry him in.”
“The old tugboat, eh? Is that what they’re calling it,” he said with a leer. “That’s a dumb place for a kid.”
“That’s what I thought. I’ll take you up on that beer another day.”
“I ain’t going nowhere.”
A giant wharf rat ran past the longshoreman’s boat and flung itself into the water.
“God damn,” the longshoreman said with a laugh. “Look at the size of that fucker.”
Eoghan was grilling sirloin on his charcoal kettle with a dirty, floral apron on. His outdoor area was illuminated by a portable work light powered by an extension cord that snaked out of his trailer.
“You seen a kid run by here?” Larry asked.
“I’ve seen him,” Eoghan said. “That would be Linda’s youngest.”
As far as Larry knew, no children were living at the marina. The community wasn’t dangerous but it wasn’t exactly a suitable place for a child.
“Who’s that?”
“She comes and goes. She and her two kids. Hellcats those things are. Feral creatures.”
At this point in their relationship, Larry knew Eoghan was going to give him the full story whether he wanted it or not.
“She bartends sometimes at Mrs. Brown’s dive, Ray’s Corner Bar.”
According to Eoghan, the last he had heard of Linda before she turned back up was that she had been living in Bakersfield where she was caring for her mother, who was dying of a mysterious and aggressive cancer in the Tree Smoke Mobile Estates with her latest husband. The husband was an ex-military man who lived on disability courtesy of the U.S. government. He suffered from a rare condition called Alternobaric facial paresis, meaning his face was frozen due to pressure-related effects on the middle ear. The man said that the cause and treatment of his malady were state secrets that could not be revealed on the threat of death.
The five of them–Linda, her two kids, her mother, and her stepdad–had lived crammed into a double-wide trailer under the baking sun while the mom wasted away to nothing. Under the influence of her husband, she refused to see a medical doctor and would only agree to be treated with shamanic and plant medicines. After she died, her husband did nothing but drink and cry and make passes at Linda in front of the kids, so they had to leave. She also had a suspicion that her mother never had cancer and that this frozen-faced vet may have actually been poisoning her.
After her time in Bakersfield, Linda lived with her brother, her only sibling, in a cabin on the Oregon coast. He was a certified right-wing gun nut, but great with the kids. He had gone to Washington D.C. with a group of like-minded friends and that was the last she had heard from him.
“She comes from Delta people,” Eoghan said while pointing his thumb over his shoulder to the east. “You know what I’m saying. Raised around those hillbillies out toward Sacramento. Ultra conservatives with a reverence for hip-hop culture. It creates a strange and unholy brew.”
“Hmm,” said Larry.
Eoghan growled at him.
“Let’s not get into politics.”
He continued.
The brother, if he were alive, was the last of her family. Linda’s father had been a high-end cocaine dealer in the 90s who died from the cardiovascular pitfalls of his product. Eoghan had crossed paths with him back then when he worked in the restaurant business and thought his temperament was a tad too sweet for the drug trade. The father invested all of his money in sports and Disney memorabilia. There was millions of dollars of junk in a storage space in Rio Vista, which Linda had to pay one hundred and nine dollars a month for. She had talked to a couple of collectors about a bulk purchase, but no one would even take the time to look at the stuff. Still, she was sure that she could offload the crap and then the salad days would arrive.
“What about the father of her children?” Larry asked.
“A French expatriate and a complete weasel,” Eoghan said of him. “Even looks like one with his little pinched French face and furtive movements.”
After the birth of their second child (the Frenchman’s fourth), he started getting interested in alien autopsies and theories about Michelle Obama having a penis. He lost hours of his day watching videos on his phone promoting a cascade of absurd myths.
Linda lost any shred of interest in him and he lost his job washing dishes at a well-known restaurant in Berkeley. There was a whiff of domestic violence and then the guy disappeared. The last time Linda had a bead on him he was living in an abandoned restaurant in Long Beach. The kids never mentioned him and seem to have forgotten that he exists.
Larry loved a woman who was down on her luck; it was a quiet relief that expectations of himself would be low. So, he found himself at the door of an old boathouse that had been converted into a residence. It was one of the sturdiest on the compound and had a private bath and toilet.
Linda was leaning against the side of the building trying to block the wind that was blocking her from lighting a joint. She was stagelit by an overhead LED security lantern.
The first thing Larry noticed was her bad dye job – hot pink at the bottom, platinum blonde in the middle, and mousy brown at the roots.
“You got a light?” she said to him.
“I don’t.”
“Cigarette?”
“Are you offering me one?”
She laughed at that. It was a child’s laugh.
“No, bozo, I’m asking if you’ve got one.”
“I’m sorry, it’s never been a habit of mine.”
“Good for you.”
“I believe I met your son earlier this evening.”
She looked like she was going to be sick.
“Was he bothering you?”
“No, but he was playing on the abandoned tugboat. It’s not a very safe place for a child and he seemed a little scared. And, well, I just wanted to make sure he was alright”
Linda’s demeanor suddenly changed. Rather than becoming defensive, she became playful.
“You’re new around here?” she asked.
She hitched up her pants, which were far too big for her waist, and motioned for Larry to join her inside. Sitting on a ripped faux leather couch were her two children bathed in the light of the TV glow. Linda said the boy’s name was Florent. The daughter, who looked like she had not a few years on the boy, was not introduced.
“Good to see you again,” Larry said to Florent.
Larry was awkward around children.
The boy hung his head and wrung his fingers.
“Duuuuude,” Linda said to him, “answer the man,”
Florent managed a meek response. “Yeah,” he said, “you too.”
Linda opened the fridge in the kitchen area and said, “We’ve got a couple of Budweisers and a bottle of prosecco.”
“I’m ok,” Larry said.
“So much for the party,” she replied in a disappointed voice. “Kids, it’s time for bed.”
“You know what, maybe I will take a Budweiser.”
Larry woke up on Linda’s couch in his t-shirt and underwear with no blanket to hide his skinny body. He had a headache and his mouth tasted of halitosis and sweet wine. With one crusty eye peeled open, he spied the boy child before him. He had a blanket under one arm and a stuffed animal tucked under the other. It reminded Larry of the Norman Rockwell figurine his fraternal grandmother had given the family one Christmas. His mother had said it was too tacky to have in her house and threw it out.
Larry sat up and searched for his pants. Florent sat next to him on the couch.
“Can I watch TV?”
“Maybe you should ask your mom.”
“She’s still asleep.”
Larry found his pants, pulled them on, and fastened his belt. By the light through the window, he could see that day was approaching but it was still early.
“What time is it?” he said. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”
Florent looked up at him with pleading eyes.
“Alright then, go ahead, but keep the volume down. You don’t want to wake everyone up.”
Two hours later, Larry woke up on the couch again; this time Florent was asleep in the crook of his arm. The picture on the TV was paused. A small box in the corner of the screen asked, “Do you wish to continue?”
Larry and Linda had a standing date every night from that day forward until the day she walked out of his life. Most nights they spent at Linda’s since they didn’t have to go outside to go to the bathroom. He slept on the couch and she slept on a full-size bed with the two kids. Once the kids were asleep, Linda would smoke a bit of weed and make cocktails. The dialogue was inane and she was not affectionate, but Larry thought a deep connection was being forged.
On the nights that she worked at the bar, Larry served as unpaid childcare. The kids would stay at the shipping container in sleeping bags he had purchased at Target. He’d put on the B-side of Environments 4: Gentle Rain in a Pine Forest, and make up stories about faraway places. Florent would wriggle his sleeping bag close to Larry and fall asleep, the girl stared off into some private blank space, disinterested and untouchable. Linda would return from her shift at one or two in the morning, slip into Larry’s bed, and pass out. He found it hard to get a good night’s sleep with the alcohol and tobacco fumes emanating from her side of the mattress.
On a Saturday afternoon near Halloween, Linda had left Florent in the care of Larry while she and her daughter borrowed his car and headed somewhere east. Whether it was to the mall, out for ice cream, or to the horse track, Larry didn’t know, though he did know that he and Florent had not been invited. The women had their own world that the boys were not allowed into, and Linda was happy to let Larry take on the responsibility of looking after Florent while she and the girl got themselves involved with various activities. She did not speak to her daughter like a child. She swore liberally in conversation with her, spoke of her father in the most gruesome of terms, and saw no issue with the kid being in the room while talking of sexual and adult things. It was an alarming turnoff that Larry ignored.
As Florent began a third hour of TV watching, Larry felt a dull ache in his stomach and a storm upon his mind.
“Get up and get dressed,” Larry commanded.
Florent lay across Larry’s argyle sofa half covered by his sleeping bag.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because we need to get out of this metal box.”
“Why?”
“Because we can’t sit here watching TV all day, ok?”
“Ugh,” Florent said as he rolled his eyes. “Fine.”
“Turn off the TV then.”
“Just let me finish my show.”
“No. Now.”
Larry had to wrestle the remote control out of Florent’s hot little hand. The kid whined and moaned and even shed a few tears as if his poor heart was breaking. Once the TV was turned off, he resigned himself to his new reality with a huff.
“Put on some clean clothes,” Larry said. “I’ll pack some snacks.”
Florent began rooting around in the garbage bag that his mother used as a clothes hamper and overnight bag.
“Are these clothes clean?” he asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine, dude. Do they smell clean?”
“Mmm, they smell ok.”
“Good enough.”
With the car gone, their only option was to travel on foot, but there was plenty to do at the marina on a Saturday afternoon. They stopped at the Airstream Caravel that housed Crazy Bean, the coffee shop. Larry bought Florent a hot chocolate and a scone, which the child thought was too dry. At the yacht club, they met up with Psychic Teresa. She lived in a custom-built pontoon houseboat on the marina that had been built by her ex-husband, Tom, who was a magician and stand-up comic. Tom had left Psychic Teresa for another marina resident. His new partner was a reclusive older man who lived in a yurt in a secluded area of the property with a yard full of goats.
“How about an aura reading, Teresa?” Larry asked.
“It’s impossible to read the aura of a child,” she said.
“Aw, come on.”
She motioned for the boys to sit down at a card table that was covered with a hippy tapestry.
Psychic Teresa’s process was to look deeply into the eyes of her client and then let her hand blindly seek out one of several Crayola crayons that were laid out on the table before her. With the crayon her fingers found she would begin scribbling amorphous shapes upon an 8.5×11 piece of plain white printer paper, all the while never breaking eye contact with her client. The whole ethereal experience lasted no more than two or three minutes. After returning to this earthly realm, she would then explain the meaning of the patterns on the paper.
“You have a violet aura,” she said to Florent.
“What does that mean?” he said.
“Hush, child, and I shall tell you.”
Psychic Teresa closed her eyes and let her head roll about.
“Don’t scare the kid, Teresa,” said Larry.
“Shh,” she snapped at him without opening her eyes. “Those with a violet aura are spiritually talented. They are guides and healers. They don’t care for superficial things and they long for deep, meaningful connections.”
“That’s good, dude,” Larry said to Florent.
The kid looked a bit scared but was transfixed by the performance.
“Your mission in life,” she continued, “will be to have an efficacious impact on others.
You must discover your one true calling.”
Larry did not know what the word efficacious meant.
“How do I do that?” Florent said.
“Alright, alright,” Larry butted in. He wanted to avoid this line of conversation. “Me next.”
Psychic Teresa again entered into a trance. Larry couldn’t help but smirk at her efforts. He’d seen this woman cooking Kraft mac and cheese with hotdogs in the communal kitchen. Still, he was concerned to see her making oval shapes with a gray crayon.
“Gray is the color of stagnant energy,” she said.
Larry could have sworn she was returning his smirk.
“That’s not good,” he said.
“It is not. This is typically drawn from hesitation or a lack of willpower. You might help yourself by making new friends and exploring new opportunities.”
“I’ve got a new friend right here.”
He stuck an elbow into Florent’s ribs. The boy couldn’t take his eyes off the medium and was not amused by Larry’s attempt to make a joke out of her.
“This is a warning sign,” she said, “bring more happiness and lightheartedness into your life. Do it now before the gray gets any darker.”
Larry turned to Florent and rolled his eyes performatively.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Larry led Florent down to the waterfront docks where the longshoreman was drinking beers on his boat. Despite the chill in the air, he had his shirt off and was catching what sun he could after an early morning rain. The wrap-around shades on his bald head reflected the waning light.
“Hey, Lar,” he said as they approached. “Who’s this guy? Your older brother?”
“No, this is Linda’s youngest, Florent.”
The longshoreman opened a fresh bottle and flicked the cap into the bay.
“Never heard of her.”
“Why are those sails up,” Florent said pointing at the red sails of the longshoreman’s boat.
Looking up at the sails flapping languidly in the breeze, the longshoreman replied, “I don’t know how to take them down. Shit, I’m lucky this boat hasn’t taken off by itself.”
“Can’t you watch a video about how to take them down?”
“Yeah, I suppose I could, but I’m not going to.”
To Larry, he said, “Smart ass kid.”
Larry smiled and said, “Can we borrow a couple of your fishing poles?”
Larry pointed at a pile of old poles with rusted rods and corroded handles.
“Don’t know that you’ll catch anything with those pieces of crap. My dad collected those things thirty years ago. I don’t have any bait either.”
“That’s alright.”
Larry figured the kid would be fine with dropping a hook, and anyway, he didn’t want to touch anything that had been living in the oil-slicked water.
After a quick lesson in casting, Larry sat on the pier with his line in the water while Florent tried to get the hang of it. He cast, reeled in the line, cast again, again, and again. The longshoreman hovered behind them offering a beer to Larry, which he accepted, and advice to the boy.
“Flip the bail,” the longshoreman said. “Flip the bail while holding the line against the grip.”
Though he didn’t understand, Florent tried to follow the instructions. In ten minutes he was worn out from the effort and sat down next to Larry. He let his line out and the unbaited hook sank to the bay floor. The longshoreman gave up on his pupil and returned to his boat.
“Do you know your dad?” Florent asked.
“I knew him.”
Larry was concerned that there would be a follow-up to that question. He could hear the gears grinding in Florent’s head.
“Was he a good dad?”
“Well, I didn’t see him much. I only met him a handful of times.”
He sighed.
“My dad was a merchant marine. Do you know what that is??”
“No.”
“He worked on boats for the army, but he wasn’t a soldier. He brought the soldiers’ supplies to them wherever they were in the world.”
“Like guns and stuff?”
“Yeah, guns and stuff, but also, food and letters from home and radios and books. Anything a soldier might need.”
Florent stared down into the water.
“Is my dad dead?”
“I haven’t heard anything like that.”
“My mom says he lives over an ocean away.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Do you think he’s a good dad?”
Larry felt ill-equipped to answer this question and was sure this was a pivotal moment for the boy. What he said next could ruin the kid forever, so he wanted to be as anodyne as possible.
“I’m sure he loves you very much, and wherever he is, he is thinking about you right now. I bet he thinks about you all the time.”
Florent touched Larry’s right arm and with his fingers, he delicately traced the faded tattoos.
“Why do you have a knife tattooed on your arm?” Florent asked.
“I don’t know. I got it when I was much younger. It was a stupid thing to do. I don’t think of things the way I did back then.”
The two of them sat in silence for a long while. Down in the water, nothing was lurking, dead or alive.
As mysteriously as they arrived, Linda and her children disappeared. One day, they were just gone. She hadn’t mentioned anything about leaving to Larry. They had carried out their normal routine the night before. If she was more distant than usual he hadn’t noticed because she had always been distant.
People were always meeting and leaving, and Larry no longer had any expectations that any one of them would stay. He did think he’d have a little more time with Linda, but like everyone else, like his father, like his first wife and his second, like every friend he ever had, every cat and every dog, like his mother when she met his stepdad in Taos, New Mexico, like every co-worker who said they would keep in touch and was never heard from again, Linda left too. He knew he was only good to someone until they found a better option. “And, let’s face it,” he thought, “I am not a good option.” In Linda, however, he felt he had met his match, and that they had an understanding. Perhaps their relationship lived outside of the halls of passion, but he had allowed himself to get carried away. He had imagined a future.
“She’ll be back,” Eoghan told him. “She always comes back.”
Larry had no use for hope. What he needed was time. He calculated the time it would take to not feel hurt and embarrassed any longer. The figure he came up with was twenty-eight days. About four weeks. One week for every month he had known her. If he could get through that period, all would be well.
The days wafted by. At work, a thin gray film covered his eyes brought on by nights spent alone with the dark hood of alcohol over his head. If one of his colleagues inquired about his dreary mien, he planned to spill all his troubles and leave himself at their mercy. Nobody asked.
Then the winter rains arrived, turning the Rotavi Marina into a community of mud. Rivulets of brown water spiderwebbed in between the homes. The communal spirit that flourished in the summer and fall gave way to a necessitated isolation. Even in his foggy condition, Larry felt more changes coming on.
The longshoreman had made up with his wife and decamped for their townhome. Eoghan’s nagging cough had grown worse and he was having trouble getting around. He was relying on his neighbors to deliver meals and his sister was visiting more often. When Larry saw her white Mercedes parked in front of his trailer for the third time in a week, he predicted that Eoghan was either dying or preparing to move into his sister’s ADU in whatever tony suburb she came from.
For three weeks, the nights repeated themselves. Larry would get deep into his cups and the evening rain would fall on his head as he sat on the Adirondack chair in front of his shipping container. As he suspected it would, the discomfort of desertion was leaving him. He remembered that the freedom to float through life on a lazy river of alcohol and minor responsibilities was a gift to be cherished. Surely, Larry thought, he must have been some type of moron to deny the verity of this.
“Phooey,” he would say to the world and then flash a bitter smile to prove how happy he was with this outcome.
On one of these nights, he saw a small, fuzzy figure approaching from the abandoned train tracks that bordered the marina. He’d never hallucinated while drinking before, but he rubbed his eyes with his fists to see if he could make the apparition disappear. He could not.
Larry muttered to himself, “Shoot me.”
Of course, it was the boy. He was wearing his pajamas with the spaceships on them and his little yellow Crocs. The neckline of the pajama top was stretched out, making him appear extra pathetic. He looked like a drowned rat.
The child had closed some of the distance between them but was still a way off. Larry stood up and yelled at him.
“So, you’ve moved back have you?”
The words came out slurred and evil.
The apparition froze where it stood, paused for a moment, and then began running toward Larry.
“No, no, no, no, no,” Larry yelled.
All of the resentment and disappointment in Linda, hell, all the resentment and disappointment he felt in everyone, was transferred to this child. He didn’t care where it had been or what it had been through, Larry could not face him and had no desire to help him.
With the quickest reflexes he could muster, Larry spun in the mud, hurried into the shipping container, and slammed the door shut. After putting the two-by-four door barricade in place, he moved to the kitchen to fix himself a large drink. He put his earbuds in and turned it up to full volume. Bruce Springsteen. John Cougar. Tom Petty. Strong songs for strong men. He didn’t bother to take off his soiled work boots.
With the lights out, he cowered in a corner of his kitchen waiting for the evil spirit to leave. Through the layer of din, he could hear the knocking on his metal door. It went on and on until he fell asleep to its rhythm.
Larry’s head felt like glass when he woke up fully clothed in the corner. The clock on the stove said 7:46, which meant he would have to get up and, with all haste, prepare himself for work. He threw open his chamber door somewhat concerned but resigned to the idea that he would find Florent outside soaking wet, ill, or maybe dead. Instead, he saw police cars. They were parked in the lower lot near the docks. Two police officers were on the pier talking with the longshoremen, whose boat was gone.
With a nauseating feeling in his gut, Larry walked down to join the crowd of his neighbors. Most of the marina residents were still in their pajamas. A policewoman was holding a nylon dock line and examining it.
“Someone cut the lines,” Eoghan said to whomever was in earshot.
He coughed and spat on the ground.
“Those ropes were twenty years old,” said Psychic Teresa. “They could have snapped.”
“Isn’t that unlikely?” Eoghan asked.
“Twenty-plus years of prolonged exposure to sun and water would have degraded them enough to snap,” said Teresa. “I told him that his lines were starting to fray and crack.”
“No, no,” Eoghan said, “they were cut.”
“Who would want to steal that piece of junk?” Teresa said.
After performing their duties, the police officers returned to their vehicles and drove away. The community gathering broke up, and the marina residents retired to their homes. The longshoremen came ambling up the slope toward Larry. With his eyes behind his sunglasses, it was hard to tell if he was feeling grumpy or mischievous.
“She kicks me out again, which you bet your ass she will,” he said, “where’m I supposed to go?”
Michael James Tapscott is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer, musician, and songwriter. Since 2004 he has been recording and performing under various names. His works of journalism and criticism were previously published in Freedom Fiction Journal, Stirring, Dusted Magazine, and Nuvo. For one brief, beautiful moment, he was the publisher and editor of the Bloomington, Indiana-based magazine Revolution Blues.