Ghost Sea: A Novel (Dugger/Nello Series) (4 page)

I
’m not some dreamer who believes a woman to be his sole salvation. Women have come and gone in my life, some leaving an emptiness, others just the door open behind them, and I lived through them all and mostly kept my footing. But for some inexplicable reason—and I had been around, I was past thirty then—the first time I saw Katherine Hay on a street, in a crowd with the July sun on her auburn hair, eyes aglow, her steps so full of life, I was shaken. I ran after her and almost under a tram; what I would say when I caught her never crossed my mind.

She stopped on a corner, waiting out the traffic, and I landed beside her, out of breath. She glanced up surprised and I stared into her eyes, before forcing my gaze away, whistling weakly at a cab down the street. A shrill whistle ripped the air behind me. I turned. She stood there, smiling, fingers at her lips—I was a goner.

I sound like a schoolboy smitten at first sight, but when in this sorry world a face still passionate, still bursting with life appeared, believe me, it kindled something close to hunger, like a desperation. If a shooting star hurtled toward you from the heavens, would you turn away? Would you not throw open your arms—reason, fear, and tomorrow be damned? I didn’t see her for a while after that. Looked for her, asked for her. For who? A frail woman, dressed too well for my empty pockets, with auburn hair and a deafening whistle. I found her practically at the ends of the earth.

I was hauling a coil of anchor rope, pouring sweat in the August sun, resting at every chance along the waterfront. At the Great Northern docks they were loading lumber bound for Mexico onto steamers. In an outside berth lay the last of the four-masted schooners pointing her proud bowsprit at the land; but she was old. Her crew toiled with care among her shrouds, decking the enormous weights gingerly. Her ends sagged, her sheer had lost its sweep; across her once-white planking, each fastener eked tears of rust, and with her patched hull and wavy bulwarks, she looked too infirm ever to leave port again.

At Hastings Mills the great saws screamed. Perched on a thousand pilings, shrouded by smoke and steam, were sheds, rickety cranes, and tar-seamed water towers; skids, horse carts, and gas trucks; dry-docked scows and dry-rotted boathouses, and a heap of steam-donkeys condemned to rust in the mud. And in that infernal din, weary, noise-silenced men loaded, sorted, tugged, and hauled, awaiting the salvation of the beer parlor. I was at the stinking cannery, where turbaned Sikhs on scows stood knee-deep in dead fish, when I saw her.

A blindingly varnished launch swung into view below me. She was sitting on the coamings in a plain white dress, hair glowing—she was the only one outside that day without a hat—sitting next to somber-suited men studying a map. She gazed detached at the smooth wake of the launch, then looked beyond toward the open sea.

I
ASKED ABOUT
her around town: the docks, beer parlors; asked Mr. Chow in Chinatown, who was kept current on everything, asked at the ship terminal where all the steamers disembarked, and the Hotel Vancouver where I knew the concierge because I took him and his mistress on a cruise once overnight. Nothing. Little by little I pushed her from my mind.

I busied myself with a load of gears and spare parts for steam-donkeys up the coast, when early one evening a rowing skiff, perfect as a violin, pulled up alongside the ketch and hailed. It was a deckhand all in white, asking politely if I would consider a small job for the captain of a motor yacht. The man pointed to a gleaming eighty-footer anchored near the woods up the bay. The owner had bought a sailing dinghy for his wife, and there was no one aboard who knew how to rig it. Would I be interested? Those days I would have eaten a boulder for a dime.

The yacht—up close—was even more perfect than its skiff. The captain, a kind-faced man with life-worn eyes, greeted me as we climbed the ladder. He complimented me on the ketch, and how well she maneuvered in light airs in tight quarters; he had seen me these past weeks.

The dinghy was on the aft deck, its rigging coiled, blocks, cleats, and turnbuckles scattered about. I laid everything out close to the final placement, stepped the mast to find the angles for the shrouds—they hadn’t even mounted chain plates—and was just checking the leads for angles, when I saw her.

I had backed down the side deck to sight the rake for the mast, and looked through the windows into the main salon, where the long, gleaming table, with its silver and crystal, reflected the red glow from the sky. She sat at one end of the table, listening to a man at the other end with his back to me. I shuddered. Felt hot or cold, I can’t remember which. The decks were unlit, the sun just gone, so she could not have seen me on the dark side in the dusk. The cabin boy brushed by us, lighting gimbaled lanterns on the cabinside as he went.

With the deck now lit, my movement caught her eye. She looked up. She continued to speak to her companion but her gaze rested on me, and I swear I saw her blush. Her eyes stayed riveted on me, with the urgent look of a fellow conspirator.

“Cotton,” I said hoarsely to the captain. “Cotton line for sheets. This hemp will be too rough on her hands.” I couldn’t think of another excuse to stay. They said they would return for me tomorrow.

In the morning, I felt as if I’d been drinking all night. I scrubbed, shaved, dressed, slicked, as if going to a ball. Didn’t realize just how nervous I was until I took a last glance in the mirror.

I rowed humming “Sloop John B.” to calm myself. The dinghy gear I had requested awaited me. I went to work, not daring to look up even when I heard footsteps. It was always just the crew. Then, when I had almost finished, her shoes stepped into my sight. I looked up. She stood smiling, her light dress fluttering against her in the breeze. She thanked me for my help, and said how eager she was to get out in the boat. I managed to say, “Just don’t forget to turn back at the narrows. It’s a tough little boat, but China, I don’t know.” She laughed. Such an open heart-felt laughter, with her head thrown slightly back, that the whole crew laughed with her. Infectious. And her eyes. Great dark pools. Unguarded, dancing, sparkling with life. I had to look away. Another woman came and they boarded the shining skiff and the kid rowed them ashore. “Thank you again,” she called. And waved. I kept rigging. They were walking along the shore when the air was rent with her whistle. Then her laughter.

Rowing back to the ketch, I felt nothing in particular, nothing that I noted, not until I pulled alongside, cleated the painter, and clambered back on board.

Everything had changed. The brightness of the light, the richness of colors, the grain in the wood deck, the reflection in the polished brass—the world. The evening was awash with a transparent pink glow, and everything—the texture of ropes, shapes of blocks, the curve of the sheer—all seemed to have assumed a mystical intensity.

The ketch—my first love, until now—seemed suddenly to stand apart from me. I went below. The flecks of sunlight bouncing off the water, rippling in slow waves between the deck beams overhead, seemed a magical event. And the silent shadows deep in the forepeak, seemed to reach onward, endlessly forever. I needed air. I rowed ashore. A creek flowed from the forest into green pools on the rocks. The water splashed, gurgled, foamed a brilliant white, exuberant, full of life. And the mossy rocks around it—even
they
seemed to breathe. It was as if a veil had been lifted—behind which I had cowered all my life.

In Chinatown that evening, instead of hurrying past people as was my habit, I felt myself slow and let them sweep me onward. Like sailing through a pass, where the current grabs you and the rudder no longer steers because it no longer bites; you’re just being swept away. But it wasn’t frightening; it was almost reassuring that some great wild force now had me, and hurtled me along. And in the open-fronted shops of Chinatown even the badly plucked duck carcasses, hanging by their necks, looked beautiful.

I didn’t dream about her that night. I lay half awake and thought about her. Her dark eyes filled the night, enormous and enigmatic.

The simple repetitious chores of daily life—lighting the fire, making a ten-word entry in the log book, tying a knot—became unsolvable puzzles. I stared dumbly at a rope or the empty page. When I was alone I talked to her. Aloud. Even around others I had to catch myself sometimes.

The next two afternoons I saw her in her dinghy, fumbling with the sails, just out of the shadow of the yacht. I hardly slept those nights. The third night I slept but woke up at dawn. The light soft; all calm. I felt much better. It was over. Back to normal. I thought of hauling the anchor chain onto the dock, checking it and repainting the fathom marks, a red stripe at ten fathoms, white at fifteen, two red at twenty, two white, and so on.

Four days later, when I sailed back from the islands, I almost killed her.

There was a rickety floathouse on logs anchored near the woods at the entrance of our bay. To sail up to my dock, I had to sail close to it, almost touching, then make a sharp turn into the wind and drift up to my float. Preoccupied with looking for her near the yacht, I didn’t see her little boat coming out from behind the floathouse. I almost ran her down. My boom slammed her shrouds and knocked her over. She clutched the gunwales, but had the good sense to leap to the high side to right her boat. There was fear in her eyes, even more beguiling than before. I veered hard short of the dock and had to go back out and try again. The yacht’s skiff rushed out and towed her home.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
the cabin boy rowed over as soon as he saw me on deck. The lady sent profound apologies. He handed me an envelope with much too generous a payment for the half day’s work of rigging. Then, just as he pulled away, he looked up and said, “The lady would like to know if you could teach her how to sail.”

We began the next day at ten. I must say I owe God an immeasurable favor. Can you imagine being with her in a small boat,
a sailboat
she barely knew? Anywhere else I would have been at her mercy—on the street corner, I couldn’t think of a word to say—but here, it was my world. I knew every damned thing: a hundred names, a thousand tricks, how to get her into danger and how to get her out. In a sailing dinghy at sea, she was mine.

I rowed over with enormous pulls, then long glides—childish, I know—and reached the yacht in a dozen pulls, each so forceful that I almost ripped the oarlocks out of the wood. She arrived in a thin dress, no sleeves; just her bare arms glowing like some goddess statue in the sun. We pushed off.

There was no wind near the yacht, so I skulled with the rudder to get us away. “No broken masts today,” she said with a laugh.

“You never know until the day is over.”

When we were out of hearing distance of the yacht, I stopped. She was sitting on a narrow fore-and-aft seat to starboard, I in the stern-to-port at the helm. Her eyes were attentive.

“Everything on a sailboat has a particular name,” I said. “Do you know them?”

“Try me.”

“What’s this?”

“That’s the rope that you pull to tighten the little sail up in the pointy end.”

“Jib sheet.”

She laughed out loud. “You’re kidding.”

“No. Jib sheet.”

“What’s wrong with ‘the rope that you pull to tighten the little sail up in the pointy end’?”

“When we’re in a typhoon, and the mast is about to break and crush us, which do you think more likely to save our lives, me yelling: ‘Slack jib sheet!’ or ‘Would you mind unraveling the loops from the little horns and letting out a foot or so of the rope you pull to tighten the little sail in the pointy end?”

She laughed heartily. “Touché.”

“We’ll do the names another time,” I said. “Now. At sea only one thing counts: the wind. You always need to know where it’s coming from. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, but looked as if the word “wind” had never crossed her mind.

“Where is it now? Can you tell?”

“There is no wind,” she said, after surveying the bay.

“There is almost always some. Land people don’t sense it, but there’s some.”

She looked at me with hurt and admiration. I turned away. “Look at the water there. It’s just a little darker. Not perfectly reflecting the light. A breath of air. Once you know what you’re looking for, you’ll find it.”

I thought she turned away from me, but she looked around and pointed with much enthusiasm. “And there.”

It was there, all right, a breath pushing a shadow over the sea.

“Very good,” I said. She turned back to me, basking in her triumph. I looked her in the eye. “Lift up your hair,” I said.

She blushed. Her long hair draped over her shoulders, and she touched it, slightly unsure. The gust of wind reached us then and tossed her hair like a veil across her face. “There’s a spot on your body,” I said softly. But she pushed the hair off her face and turned her head away. “The back of your neck. That’s the one spot that always feels the wind.”

She gathered her hair and raised it slightly, baring her shoulders. “More,” I said. “Lift it more.” It came out like an order, and she obeyed. The tide was ebbing, pushing us imperceptibly out to sea.

“Most people would give up now,” I said. “They’d get out the oars and row.”

“We have no oars,” she said.

“So we find the wind.”

She concentrated.

“Close your eyes.” An order. “Now, always thinking of the back of your neck, turn your head.” She did. “When you think you have it, turn it ever so little back and forth until you’re sure.”

“I have it,” she said.

I crouched past her to the mast, my leg brushing hers, pushing her dress above a knee. I hoisted the sail.

The wind strengthened. Tossed the boom, darkened the sea. We surged ahead. I slipped to the side. “You steer,” I said.

“Where?”

“Wherever you want to go.”

She held the tiller firmly and, with the wind behind us, headed out to sea. Then she said in deadly earnest, “Except China.”