Driver's Education (35 page)

“Nuestras familias,”
they said.
“Nuestras familias necesitan comer.”

They were trying to convince my granddad to join them. If you don't know anything about deep-sea fishing, take it from me (who heard it from my granddad)—it can be treacherous business. Reeling in a hefty marlin that puts up a substantial contest can take upward of three hours—a marathon of a struggle that no single man is cut out for. In other words, it requires teams. A group of men who take turns sitting in bolted-down chairs, white-knuckling the pole, passing it off to the next guy in line once they've exhausted themselves trying to reel the beast in.

“I've never done this before,” he said. “I don't know how.”

“¿Qué?”

“No se como.”

The two men looked at each other and cocked their heads; this was a question so rarely asked because the answer was so blindingly obvious.

“
Luchas,
” one of them said.

“¿Qué?”

“You fight.” He pantomimed holding a fishing rod, muscling it back toward his shoulder.
“Luchas.”

“Yes.” My granddad nodded. “
Sí.
I understand.
Entiendo
.”

They motored away from the pier at seven o'clock in the morning—forty-five minutes after the last boat headed toward the horizon—and it took them three hours to get where they wanted to go. The crew of
El Pequeño Soldado
had had luck trawling near a spot referred to loosely as 1150 Bank, about twenty-five miles off the coast between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose. It's a place where the sea floor swallows itself into craggy underwater canyons, where the depth causes the water's surface to deepen from turquoise to glossy blue. While they cruised my granddad sat on a small chair perched near the boat's bow. He watched the shore fade behind the heat's hazy screen; he closed his eyes when the ocean sprayed salt in his face. Sometimes, when the motor quieted and when the boat's hull stopped slapping the sea's surface, he'd turn back to the men. The shorter of the two, Juan, commanded the wheel; the taller, Alejandro, wrapped strands of thick rope into coils.

“How much farther?” my granddad would shout.
“¿Cuánto mas lejos?”

“Almost!” one of them would cry back. “So close!”

The bite came sometime right after noon, once they'd reach the 1150 Bank and the current had settled into a midday lull and the back of my granddad's neck had started to burn red. They were all three sitting in
El Pequeño Soldado
's cockpit eating sandwiches and drinking
cervezas
when, suddenly, there was a violent jolt. One of the poles bent like a palm in gale force winds; its line tugged outward, lifting and jerking and disappearing into the blue.

“¡Vamos!”

Juan threw the rest of his sandwich overboard, and the bread split apart from itself and sank. He strapped the pole, and then himself, into the fighting chair. A hundred or so feet off the boat's bow, a marlin leapt from the water and thrashed about. My granddad held his breath as he caught sight of it, as it furiously tried to spear the air with its nose.

“You've never seen a blue like this, Finn,” he said the first time he recounted this story for me. He was visiting my father and me in Los Angeles, and we'd decided to spend an afternoon at the Long Beach aquarium. I remember we were standing in a shark exhibit and there were these huge hammerheads that coasted in front of us, around us, above us. “The color of this fish—you've never seen anything like it. Like God and Nature had competed against each other to create the most beautiful blue there ever was. Bluer than blue. What blue wishes it could be.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I
get
it.”

“No, son, you don't.”

Juan worked the reel with brute force. He'd tease the marlin with a bit of slack, allowing it to exhaust itself, before he'd arch the rod back and reel in manically. My granddad watched the short muscles in the man's forearms clench; sweat wetted growing patches at the center of his chest, along his spine, beneath his arms.

A little bit closer now, the marlin exploded into the air again. Then it was my granddad's turn.

“You!” Alejandro coaxed him toward the seat, where Juan was still working the reel but was showing signs of fatigue. “You go!”

“All right!” my granddad shouted. He began wringing his hands together and shifting his weight between his heels. “Yes, yes, all right!” Then: “What do I do again?”

Together they yelled, “YOU FIGHT!”

At first he thought his arms were going to be pulled from their sockets, he told me. Just ripped clean out into the Sea of Cortez where they'd become chum for the circling gulls. He lurched forward in the chair and Juan had to latch on to one of his shoulders and Alejandro the other in order to keep him from being yanked into the air. He planted both his heels on the deck of the boat as he felt the men's fingers burrow into his skin, the pole's handle begin to slip and squirm from his sweaty fingers. He felt the first streams of sweat canyon down his temples and worm into the squinted corners of his eyes, but he didn't dare wipe them away—he just let them sting. But then there was a moment of stillness, a brief pause during which the marlin must've felt it safe to take a breather: the line, in a blinkable instant, went slack. And my granddad, being the sort of man who recognizes Opportunity when it presents itself, seized his chance. He began to fight.

He arm wrestled with the rod, like he'd seen Juan do minutes before. He ground his teeth together and he clenched down on his upper lip. The marlin darted right, then left, then back to the right in a blistering three count.

“It was the fastest goddamned waltz I've ever danced,” he used to say. “And I swear it knew that's what we were doing—I swear it knew we were dancing. Because when it jumped out of the water again, it looked right at me. It didn't even blink.”

“I don't think fish have eyelids, Granddad.”

“You understand what I'm saying, son.”

When they'd managed to get it within ten yards off the boat's starboard side, Alejandro took over, slipping his lanky body into the chair. While Juan had muscled the fish in, Alejandro worked with a sense of lyricism, a sense of poetry. He wove the rod in rounded arcs, like he was conducting an orchestra. The marlin's sharp, sinewy tail drummed along the sea's surface. Its thrashing was more subdued now—it was succumbing
to fatigue, its body growing numb from exhaustion. That's not to say it didn't have any life in it—because, as my granddad tells it, when the fish was hauled up onto the deck, when its gills were gulping at nothing, it was still bucking its speared nose, causing the three men to hopscotch around it, blocking their ankles behind plastic coolers.

“What are we supposed to do?” my granddad shouted, but only half-heartedly. He was transfixed, again, by the blue, the spectacular blue, the sky-into-ocean-into-electric-acid-midnight blue of the beast. He leaned over the steering wheel behind which he was hiding and his eyes grew wide.

“¡Lo golpeó!”
Juan yelled. “Hit it!”

Here's another thing about catching marlin: Once you get them into the boat, that isn't the end of it. Even out of the water, a one-thousand-pound marlin can do quite a bit of damage. So what you've got to do, you've got to stun them, basically beat them into submission.

Alejandro brandished a thick steel club. He shuffled to the other side of my grandfather, so that he was directly above the marlin.

“But wait—”

“¡Ahora!”

He said that first hit was too low—six inches down from the head—and the impact sounded fleshy and soft; the fish's body buckled, and its tale whipped a half-finished bottle of beer into the sea. Alejandro cursed.

“¡La cabeza!”
Juan shouted.

Alejandro struck again, this time between the marlin's fear-flecked eyes. There was a crack—or probably more of a thud, like a sandbag being dropped onto cement—and then the eerie onset of stillness. The lapping of the ocean against the boat's hull. The bitter squawking of gulls as they fought over the soggy remains of Juan's sandwich.

My granddad held both hands to his chest. “Did he do it? Was that it?” he asked.

It was. He did. He must've. Because then—very quickly, like film unspooling from a reel—the life began seeping out of the fish. It began at the tips of its fins, where stripes of silver and that cosmic blue dulled to a sickly grey that the sun had no interest in reflecting. And then it spread
upward, and outward, to the marlin's meaty flanks and to its rapier nose, in all directions at once—death blooming efficiently, democratically.

“What'd you do?” I asked him. We were still in the shark exhibit, watching thrashers spiral around each other.

“I cried.”

“You did not.”

“I did so.”

I asked, “Did anyone see you cry?”

“Juan did. I told him there was salt in my eyes.”

My granddad said something then—something about life being a sigh, and death being a gasp, and that's what made him cry, the sucker-punch sensation of the gasp, and he told me he never wanted to just fade out, not like that marlin did.

In fact, he actually said to me, “Finn, don't ever let that happen to me.”

“I won't,” I told him.

“Swear that you won't.”

“Yeah, okay.” Then: “What do you want me to swear on?”

He dug around in his pockets, which were empty. He looked around the strange, cavernous room. He pressed my five-year-old hand against the cool glass in front of us.

I said, “I swear on these man-eating sharks that I won't let you be like that marlin.”

He laughed to himself and smiled. He took both my shoulders and directed me toward the next exhibit, where my father was waiting for us.

•  •  •

The chair's frame is wood, and vaguely modern in that its corners are curved instead of sharp, and its upholstery is purple with blue triangles. I sit on the edge of it, and I pull it closer to my granddad's body. I lean forward until the back legs lift from the ground, until I'm two inches away from the bed, from him, from his hands that are folded like he's getting ready to hear a good story.

The technicians roll the last of the machines away.

I pull a blue blanket over one of my granddad's toes, which is exposed and colorless, grey, in the fluorescent light. And I suddenly want to
grip it, the toe, to see if it's cold, or alive; to pull myself close, to fold into him, to wrap myself in houses made of records and Charlotte Sparrow and five-hundred-home-run baseballs.

I'm passing Ernie Banks's baseball back and forth between my hands, and I notice that the sweat on my palms is causing the autograph's ink to bleed and leave traces of itself on my fingers. I think about how whenever anyone talks about hospitals the things they mention most are the sounds and the smells, but the truth is right now I don't smell anything except myself and I don't hear anything except my father's voice, which is low and throaty and warm, like it's passing through a screen of tears.

The room is divided in two by a blue curtain that's been pulled shut, even though the bed on the other side of it is empty. We're in the half of the room that's closest to the window, and through it I can see the hospital's half-empty parking lot, and beyond that Irving Street, and then the south slopes of Golden Gate Park. The city's swamped with its requisite layer of fog, which means that once we leave here, once we get back to my father's home, we won't be able to see the bay or the boats gliding across it. I think if my granddad were to ask me what the day he died was like, though, I'd tell him it was sunny. In fact, I'd tell him it was the sunniest goddamned day that San Francisco had ever seen. I'd tell him how there wasn't a single person who wasn't wearing sunglasses, and how the sea lions at Fisherman's Wharf were using their flippers to cover their eyes, and how the rust of the Golden Gate became so bright, so brilliant, that there was more than one motorist who refused to drive over it out of fear that the bridge was, actually, on fire.

Behind me, someone opens a window and I look up. I remember how my granddad told me there's no such thing as a life that's ended, there are just more stories that haven't been told.

A breeze lifts a few of my father's pages of memories from the bedside table. I reach out and stop them before they blow away. I set Ernie Banks's baseball on top of the stack to protect them from the wind.

There are so many people who deserve my endless gratitude. So I'll do my best to thank some of them here.

Richard Pine, you seem to know exactly what to say and—more important—when to say it. I promise that this gamble we've made will pay off.

Sarah Knight is probably our galaxy's best editor. Thanks for believing in my words, even before they'd been written, and for reading this thing more times than anyone should ever read anything.

To the Dream Team at NYU—David Lipsky, Max Ross, Sasha Graybosch, Anelise Chen, Michelle Kim Hall, Anissa Bazari, Ayesha Attah, Kate Brittain, Sarah Willeman, Kayla Rae Whitaker, Maura Roosevelt, Jenny Blackman, Grant Munroe, and all the others—thanks for being kind enough to tell me when things had gone terribly wrong.

Darin Strauss and Irini Spanidou—I can't believe you never locked the door and shut off the lights when you saw me coming.

Peyton Burgess—you're a hero for driving halfway across the country with me, even though you nearly got us killed in Pittsburgh.

Ben Harvey, Clare O'Connor, Molly Schulman, Billy Kingsland, Maree Hamilton, and Lucy Carson—thanks for the wine when it was needed.

Lastly—thank you, Mom and Dad and Reid and Katie. Thank you, thank you, thank you.